Re: Subversion-style incrementing revision numbers

[Joel Dice <dicej@mailsnare.net>]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> Joel Dice wrote:
>> Well, what it means is "this is the order in which commits were applied to
>> this repository".  I suggest that this information is useful for the most
>> common development style - the kind which relies on a central repository
>> as the canonical source for a project's code.  "gcc-trunk-r117064" means a
>> lot more to me than "39282037d7cc39829f1d56bf8307b8e5430d585f", and is no
>> less precise.
>
> What about "v1.4.2.1-gf7f93e7", or "tags/v1.4.2-rc4^0~19", or just
> "39282037"? Or "next@{2006-09-19 22:44:33 +0000}"?

The last one is closest to what I want in that it gives me some sense of 
the order in which commits appeared in the repository.

Anyway, after some reflection, I've come to the following conclusions:

  1. Although the IRN feature would be useful to people like me, it doesn't 
fit _naturally_ into Git in particular or DVCSs in general due to the 
fact that IRNs are tied to repositories.

  2. There are easier, more elegant ways to solve the problem of tying 
commits to bug numbers, as Shawn and Johannes pointed out.

So, I'm shelving the IRN idea until and unless I can reconcile it with the 
spirit of distributed version control.  In the meantime, I plan to pursue 
a solution along the lines of Shawn's update hook strategy for bug 
tracking, perhaps with the additional step of automatically tagging each 
such update.

Thanks for everyone's comments.

  - Joel