correcting old log messages

[Stuart McGraw]

Robert Collins wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 17:54 -0700, Stuart McGraw wrote:
>> I have no idea how Bazaar works internally so perhaps
>> something in Bazaar's design or implementation would
>> prevent doing this, but is it hypothetically reasonable?
> 
> In short - yes, we could add another dimension of versioning, so that
> revisions and their content are versioned, as well as the users source
> tree being versioned (the revisions of the source tree are 'bzr
> revisions', I have no idea what we'd call the revisions of the
> revisions :).

I'm sure that having versioned metadata is useful in some
environments, but my thought was unversioned metadata would
be also very useful (fix the uncorrectable log message problem)
and might be a lot less complex to implement: a "last changed"
timestamp (handwaving away clock skew issues here) on each
piece of changable metadata, no history.  (yes, i'm sure there
is a lot more to it. ;-)

> But its a lot of complexity; it has storage and performance implications
> (if you have 100000 revisions, do you want to check all of them on every
> operation for updates? if not, where do the changes get journalled so we
> can scan the journal... code code and more code).

I certainly defer to you regarding any evaluation of the
implementation complexity.

> Currently, it does not seem worth the complexity or investment to write
> this. AFAIK none of the modern VCS systems do this. (svn is not
> modern ;)).

The lack of this ability surprises me a little.  If someone
told me about a system into which information could be entered,
but not corrected after the fact, I would consider that system
broken (partially) without even knowing what it was supposed
to do.  But maybe that's just me.

Now that I think about it, isn't that the way the U.S.
government's terrorist watch-list works? :-)

Anyway, it was just a thought.  Thanks for the feedback.