Re: Please don't use revision numbers on commit messages (and elsewhere).

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> Anyone can setup a public repo anytime, anywhere. Let's think of a
>> long-lived feature branch of the type of lexbind or bidi
>
> The bidi branch was never alive for a long time.

bidi was mentioned as an example of a task suitable for a long lived
feature branch (and for working on a team, or at least publish the
branch and accept occasional contributions.) I was not implying that
bidi was actually managed that way.

[snip]

> So it looks like you are asking everyone and their dog to pay dearly
> _now_ for a mostly theoretical problem, that could potentially become
> a real problem in some vague future.  Good luck expecting that people
> will abide by your request!

It is not mostly theoretical. It would be affecting me if I were using
bzr (and then it would be another reason for switching to git.)

>> On a distributed project, you don't know how many active branches exist
>> out there.
>
> Emacs is not currently a distributed project, and I see no signs that
> it is going to become one.

No, you see no signs because private branches live on private machines,
which is precisely one of the specific characteristics of a dVCS. I have
two branches where I do development since a year ago. I'm sure you
wasn't aware of their existence until now :-)

>> Let me expand with an example based on my past* experience. I have a
>> number of heterogeneous machines (different OS, varying network
>> connectivity, etc) and on all of them I have Emacs running (of
>> course!). I've my private branch with some customizations, which is what
>> I use for building and installing Emacs on all those machines. Keeping
>> the private branch mirrored among all of them means work. Keeping
>> mirrors for `trunk', emacs-23 and what-not is too much of a burden (last
>> time I checked there was no simple & reliable method for synchronizing
>> sets of branches across multiple platforms.) In theory, having just my
>> private branch and merging trunk into it from time to time would be
>> enough. But then those commits messages referencing other revisions by
>> their numbers doesn't fit, as trunk's revision #110000 has another
>> number on my private branch.
>
> It is very easy to see that revision, even if it is on the other
> branch, assuming that the referenced branch is in your repo, with the
> "revno:NNN:/path/to/branch" revision identifier.

Precisely, what I described above was a setup where having the "other
branch" (say better "the other brancheS") is a burden. So I don't have
them.

[snip]