Things in common between Paul's proposal and Graydon's

• At the lowest level branches are identified by OIDs that don't have inherent semantics
• You follow a "branch descriptor" to get to a branch. The descriptor includes information about:
  • the OID of the branch
  • how to tell good revisions from bad (eg trusted keys)
• "Policy branches" are versioned branches that contaiin branch descriptors
• Policy branches don't have policy for themselves, only for other branches
  • Here, is "other branches" == sub branches? Or could net.foo.bar contain a policy for net.foo.baz? - JackLloyd
• They can have policy for other policy branches and for "normal" branches.
• Policy branches can provide names for what they refer to with branch descriptors
• or they can defer everything that is referred to them to another policy branch wholesale
• To start on a project, users import a top-level project policy branch descriptor
• ...that they fetch out-of-band, probably by getting it out of the DNS
• and they give it a name of their own choosing in their own namespace
• though they'd be best advised to give it the most usual name if they can eg "monotone" for monotone

More to come.