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

[Óscar Fuentes]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <address@hidden> writes:

>    please use the revision id, which is unique for every commit.
>
> I think it would both more vcs-agnostic and programmer-friendly to use a
> date and commit title (presuming the commit has one).  For example:
>
>   2011-03-31  Thien-Thi Nguyen  <address@hidden>
>   
>       [lib] Fix bug: Reorder #include "libserveez/foo.h" in libserveez.h.
>   
>       Regression (due to omission) introduced 2011-03-04,
>       "Mark #include "libservez/foo.h" as internal".
>       Lesson: Take care when discarding dependency (ordering) info!
>   
>       * libserveez.h: Move ‘pipe-socket’ and ‘portcfg’ before ‘cfg’.
>   
> Here, the date is 2011-03-04, and the title is "Mark ... internal".
> These two pieces of info are usually sufficient to uniquely identify a
> particular change, and a nice side benefit is that the window of the bug
> is apparently computable (in this example almost four weeks -- eep!).

Your proposal is much better than using revision numbers, IMO. It is
actually informative, although it makes difficult to pinpoint the
mentioned revision or to answer the question "is the mentioned revision
on branch X?" which is automatic when you have a revision id.

A different issue is to convince people to write proper commit messages,
with the first line acting as the commit title. But that is another
battle.

[snip]