version compare and partial orgls

[Eric Dean Tribble <tribble>]

I'm going to respond to this stuff piecemeal.

      There is no *one true identity*.  There is the canonical identity,
      which is a somewhat weaker notion.  It provides the same power,
      however, and correctly maps to the semantics of sharing-inform and the
      idea of "best knowledge."

   Quite correct, there is no one true identity.  However, as being
   sharing-informed is a monotonic process, one is getting better and
   better notions of identity.  Therefore it is an interesting (but
   perhaps confusing) rhetorical device to speak of the true identity as
   the goal which the successive EAddresses of a DataObject approach but
   never reach.  Alternatively, one can think of the true identity as the
   last canonical EAddress a given DataObject will ever have (at the end
   of time or some such).  Given this, one can define freezing a
   DataStamp wrt sharing-inform:  It is when you make an irrevocable
   commitment never to further sharing-inform the DataStamp (to do this,
   you mush have grabbed it).  Once this is done, you know that the
   current canonical identity is the true identity.

   Canonical identity is MUCH weaker than true identity: Canonical
   identity is defined wrt currently & locally available knowledge.  True
   identity is defined wrt knowledge which is omniscient across all time
   and space.  (The kind of knowledge that the basic agent of standard
   economic theory is assumed to have.  Where can we hire one?)

I strongly dislike linguistic abstractions that can't be represented or
achieved.  Especially now that we agree that freezing doesn't affect
sharing-informability, the notion of *true* identity is at best
distracting.  We can't represent it, it adds no useful insights as an
analogy, and I think it is sufficiently opposed to what is really
possible in a distributed system that it prevents us from considering
the issues of DataObject identity correctly in the distributed
context.  I suppose the case isn't quite as strong as I'm making it,
but....

dean