Referring to revisions in the git future.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Emacs.

We are switching to git, soon.

git doesn't have revision numbers.  Instead it uses cryptic identifiers,
which are not very useful in day to day conversation.  A bit like in
George Orwell's "Newspeak", where lingusists constantly removed words and
meanings so as to render certain notions literally inexpressible, we seem
to be faced with the same situation.

On this list, one quite often sees statements such as:

    "That was fixed in revision 118147, have you updated since then?"

or

    "The bug seems to have been introduced between 118230 and 118477.
    Maybe you could do a bisect to track it down.".

Is it going to be possible to express such ideas in our git world, in any
meaningful way?  If so, how?  Does git have a useable way of mapping its
cryptic revision identifiers to monotonically increasing natural numbers,
or some other useable scheme?

I have bad feelings about this.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).