Re: Referring to revisions in the git future.

[David Kastrup]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello, Emacs.
>
> We are switching to git, soon.
>
> git doesn't have revision numbers.  Instead it uses cryptic
> identifiers, which are not very useful in day to day conversation.  A
> bit like in George Orwell's "Newspeak", where lingusists constantly
> removed words and meanings so as to render certain notions literally
> inexpressible, we seem to be faced with the same situation.
>
> 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.".

So what are people going to do with this kind of information?
Copy&paste it into some command line.  A 40-letter string works just as
well as a 6 letter string for that.

If you were not talking about "on this list" but rather about "in a
typical developer meeting conversation", you'd have sort of a point,
assuming that there are developers who actually memorize revision ids
(which I somewhat doubt).  But mailing list?  Copy&paste.

> Is it going to be possible to express such ideas in our git world, in
> any meaningful way?  If so, how?

Just use the SHA1.

> Does git have a useable way of mapping its cryptic revision
> identifiers to monotonically increasing natural numbers, or some other
> useable scheme?

As long as you are not actually going to use those "monotonically
increasing natural numbers" in any manner sufficiently different from
"arbitrary digit string", and I don't see that you do here, I see no
advantage over cryptic unique strings.

> I have bad feelings about this.

I don't see what would substantiate them looking at the above.

-- 
David Kastrup