Should we rename the MASTER forest?

[Jonathan Gibbons]

I'm going to buck the trend and go -1 on this one.

The set of repositories is already confusing enough, and changing a name 
which
means something (MASTER) into a more generic name that is already used 
in the
path (jdk7) seem, well, less than desirable, to use words for polite 
company.

If there is a problem with fclones creating more MASTER repositories, 
you can fix that
by putting a dummy name component after MASTER (perhaps that is where to 
put jdk7).
At the same time you could mirror the structure into the other 
repositories and
add "integration" into the path, eg jdk7/integration/tl/*

-- Jon








Mark Reinhold wrote:
> In the experimental JDK 7 forests on http://hg.openjdk.java.net we've
> carried over an old naming convention that we at Sun have used for all
> primary JDK TeamWare workspaces for many years.  (The primary workspace
> is the one into which all group workspaces integrate, and from which
> the product is built by the release-engineering team.)
>
> That convention is to name these primary workspaces MASTER, in all caps,
> in order to stress their importance and help prevent accidental putbacks
> or, worse, corruption in the case of naive developers who cd directly
> into the MASTER tree and try to do work there.  (Yes, this has happened,
> more than once.)
>
> These sorts of accidents could happen under TeamWare because workspaces
> are shared via NFS and are (essentially) world-writable.  In the new
> world of Mercurial, of course, that's not the case.  Our server-side
> infrastructure will, moreover, only allow trusted developers to push
> changes into repositories/forests.
>
> So there's no longer much reason to use the annoying name MASTER, and
> there's at least one reason not to: Issuing the obvious hg command to
> get a local clone of the MASTER, i.e.,
>
>     % hg fclone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/MASTER
>
> will create a local forest named MASTER -- but of course it isn't the
> master, it's just a clone.  Such names can propagate, too [1], leading
> to even wider potential confusion.
>
> Given all this I hereby propose that we rename the MASTER forest simply
> to "jdk7".  That way an hg fclone will create a local forest with a more
> obvious name, and we can all give our shift keys a well-earned rest.
>
> Comments?
>
> (This may seem a trivial issue, but names are important, and once we go
>  live with Mercurial it'll be difficult to change this one.)
>
> - Mark
>
>
> [1] http://www.jfrog.org/hg/openJDK/MASTER -- I'm sure Frederic wasn't
>     trying to confuse anybody when he published this forest, he just
>     did the obvious thing.
>