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Date:      Wed, 28 Jun 2000 08:31:48 -0600 (MDT)
From:      Alex Rousskov <rousskov@ircache.net>
To:        "Chad R. Larson" <chad@DCFinc.com>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 3.5 now available . . . . .
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.10006280814320.8087-100000@pail.ircache.net>
In-Reply-To: <200006280401.VAA28066@freeway.dcfinc.com>

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On Tue, 27 Jun 2000, Chad R. Larson wrote:

> But I still think the idea has merit.  There should be some way of
> unequivocally stating "I'm running <foo>, and stuff is broken since
> when I was running <bar>".  This "I'm running -stable, cvsup'd
> sometime early in June" just doesn't cut it when trying to track
> down the source of a breakage.

As you pointed out, since people can sync only a part of their sources
(a single file in the extreme case), your ultimate goal may not be
reachable assuming that <bar>s and <foo>s strings are of a reasonable
length.

However, it seems to me that the "snapshot identifiers" (the <foo> and
<bar> above) can be quite long and can represent the state of several
(many) major chunks of the cvs tree. Each chunk gets a unique id that is
automatically changed after each commit to that chunk. Commit time may
be an acceptable identifier.

The resulting "global" identifier would look like
	"<chunk1-id> <chunk2-id> <chunk3-id> ..." 
allowing developers to approximately identify the state of the code.

Note that the string above can be MD5-ed and CRCed to make it shorter
and more robust. One can make a tool that reconstructs the original
identifier based on an MD5 digest by enumerating all known combinations
of chunk identifiers (the digest can be constructed to assist with such
a reconstruction, if needed).

$0.02,

Alex.



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