Creating something like increasing revision numbers

[Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>]

Dear all,

(please Cc)

I am managing some of my projects with git and I am quite happy about it.

There is another project I am working that is quite big, the subversion
checkout is about 14Gb. Doing svn up is a pain, it has to open tens of
thousands of files and directories traversing the whole tree, trashing
the fs cache and taking ages.

My idea was to move to git, from what I read it should be more capable
in handling these type of projects.

Now, there is one show-stopper I see. From our repository we create a
set of "packages", and the maximum of the "last-changed" revisions of
the contained files determine the "version" of the package. This 
guarantees that any change in a file will increase the revision number
of the package (some tricks for removals have to be done). This is necessary
since we are distributing the packages from servers and the version number
pf a package determines whether it should be upgraded (well known concept).

Now my question, is there any way to set up something similar with git?

My idea is that git - like subversion - could (if asked to) count each
commit (global to the repository, irrelevant of the branch) and give it
a version number. Since we all will use a bare repository on a server
and pull/push from/to there, I think that something similar could be possible.

So, before I delve into more gitty-nitty conversion, let me know if
there is any chance for that, or we should stay with subversion.

Thanks a lot and all the best

Norbert

PS: for those interested, it is TeX Live: www.tug.org/texlive

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Dr. Norbert Preining                                        Associate Professor
JAIST Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology   preining@jaist.ac.jp
Vienna University of Technology                               preining@logic.at
Debian Developer (Debian TeX Task Force)                    preining@debian.org
gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094      fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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