Re: `about-emacs' - what about the revno?

[Óscar Fuentes]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>>> Maybe we should try and provide the revno of the common ancestor on
>>> the trunk.
>> That information only makes sense for mirrors of trunk.
>> The revision-id is the real info.
>
> The revision-id from a local branch only exists in that local branch, so
> it's useless to anybody else than the owner.  I.e. it's not "the real
> info" we need.

So for what we use the revision information? How it helps to know which
was the last commit from trunk included on a build? What's the use case?

AFAIU the info is for knowing the source code used for the build, and
its main usage is for bug reports.

Having the revision-id you can test if the sources comes straight from
Savannah. If it doesn't, the bug is his business, as we have no way of
figuring out what changes his build contains.

A revision-id uniquely identifies the state of a branch, the revision
number does not. For what we need a number that may or may not
correspond to some commit on `trunk'?