Re: Referring to revisions in the git future.

[Eric S. Raymond]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden>:
> On this list, one quite often sees statements such as:
> 
>     "That was fixed in revision 118147, have you updated since then?"
> 
> or
> 
>     "The bug seems to have been introduced between 118230 and 118477.
>     Maybe you could do a bisect to track it down.".
> 
> Is it going to be possible to express such ideas in our git world, in any
> meaningful way?  If so, how?  Does git have a useable way of mapping its
> cryptic revision identifiers to monotonically increasing natural numbers,
> or some other useable scheme?

Git does not have such a mapping.  This is not the git designers being
perverse; all other DVCSes have the same issue. A true DVCS is
designed for distributed operation in which there is no privileged node
to hand out the monotonically-increasing IDs.

I agree that git hashes make a terrrible reference format.  In the git
version of the guidelines for working with the repository I will advise
bnver using them.  Instead, refer to a commit by its author and date,
or (even better) by quoting the summary line from its log comment.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>