Re: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Eric S. Raymond)
> Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:36:52 -0400 (EDT)
> 
> While running my latest repository conversion, I found this comment
> 
>     revno: 116811.1.662
>     fixes bug: http://debbugs.gnu.org/18384
>     committer: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>
>     branch nick: emacs-24
>     timestamp: Tue 2014-09-02 18:16:42 +0300
>     message:
>       Fix bug #18384 with incorrect reporting of row number by posn-col-row.
>       
>        lisp/subr.el (posn-col-row): Revert the change from commit
>        r99634.2.576 address@hidden, which
>        was inadvertently merged from emacs-23 release branch in r102428
>        address@hidden, and
>        introduced an off-by-one error in the reported row when there is a
>        header line.
>       
>        src/dispnew.c (buffer_posn_from_coords): Fix an off-by-one error in
>        the reported row in the case of a window with a header line, by
>        improving on the fix committed in r106022
>        address@hidden
> 
> There are two things about this comment that make my life
> unnecessarily more difficult.
> 
> 1) People are continuing to embed bzr revision numbers like
>    r99634.2.576 and r102428 in comments.  Do not do this.  

There's no easy way to refer to an old commit in an unequivocal way.

>    They're soon going to cease being meaningful, and every time
>    I have to run another conversion to clean these out it costs
>    me eight to ten hours.

I thought you already have machinery in place to do that
automatically.

> 2) "address@hidden" Um.  What the *hell*?

It's a bzr revision-id.  You can use it in "bzr log" or any other bzr
command that accepts a revision spec.

>    This is not the time to be inventing some random new magic-cookie
>    commit reference format that my tools don't know how to recognize.
>    That should have been 2010-11-13T21:07:address@hidden (I think).

I was certain you already deal with this.  If not, please tell what
information you need to convert this automatically.

> The correct format for a commit reference that will remain
> intelligible across every VCS, forever, is this:
> 
> <RFC3339-date>!<email-address>
> 
> Example: 2010-11-13T21:07:address@hidden

How can I produce this automatically given the information I have
about the revision, i.e. its number and, possibly, revision-id?
Is it possible to write a command to do this?