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

[Nils Ackermann]

Juanma Barranquero <address@hidden> writes:

> Sure I do. And you know why? Because Bazaar revnos are *convenient*,
> and Bazaar revids are a royal PITA. I don't want to abandon convenient
> shorthands for what, at the moment, is just FUD.

They are a convenience only locally in space (branch) and time (bzr
version).  Bazaar provides no guarantee with respect to stability of
revision numbers.

For example, revision numbers may change if one pushes by accident to a
(public) branch that should not be pushed to, and that doesn't have the
`append-revisions-only'-property set (it has happened before, even to
trunk, as far as I can recall).

More importantly, revision numbers not only depend on the branch, but
also on the bzr version.  I recall that the numbering, which is only
calculated at use time, has changed twice since 2005.  As recently as a
year ago there was a discussion on new ideas for calculating revision
numbers:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.bazaar-ng.general/67756