The issue is that Monticello is setup for distributed processing, and allowing for multiple repositories, some of which may not be available to all of the users for a project. For instance, a project might be developed internally (or on the developers hard-drive) until they feel comfortable distributing the code later. So, publicly, you get version 12, 17, 34, and 37. There is no access to the intermediate ones (unless you happen to be the one that created them and didn't release them). The 'whole ancestry' let's you do diffs off of a version derived from 37 against one derived from 34 - the ancestry can determine that version 34 if 'common', and work from there. [Note that just numbers aren't enough - the original developer, say, cbc could have version cbc.34, while you could have, say, CamilloBruni.34, but yours is based off of 17 (since you picked up that verison and started working there). So, merging cbc.37 with CamilloBruni.34 would need to pull down cbc.17 for a good merge to work.]
At least, that's my understanding from long ago discussions. -Chris On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 2:15 PM, Camillo Bruni <[email protected]> wrote: > well, you usually cache the mcz in your local directory cache (at least > that's the default). > and extracting the meta-data out of a local mcz is rather cheap since zip > allows you to directly extract certain files. > > maybe we could add another entry to the mcz with just the stripped down > version info in it. this way older monticello versions would still be able to > load it the slow way, whereas an updated version could benefit from > incremental loading? > > > On 2012-03-01, at 23:11, Nicolas Cellier wrote: > >> I think the main reason is that you cannot load just the metadata, but >> the whole mcz when you need to dig into the history... >> That ain't cheap, and that happens when you merge more or less distant >> branches. >> >> Also, it's not unusual to upload directly version N+5 without the >> whole N+1 to: N+4 ancestry... >> In this case MC can still find a common ancestor.
