Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps

[Eric S. Raymond]

Stephen J. Turnbull <address@hidden>:
> I really don't see what's wrong with
> 
> 2014-09-15  Stefan Monnier  <address@hidden>
> 
> * JOKES (dumb_joke_internal):  Revert Eric Raymond's commit of
>   2014-04-01 [deadbeefcafefeeddefaceddeafadd0123456789].
>   It was a funny-once, Man.
> 
> Or whatever formatting you want, as long as the SHA1 ref is easily
> parsable out of the text.

At least two things are wrong with it.

One is a genuinely funny gotcha.  You can't get to git hashes without
going through something semantically like my version stamps on the
way!

Think hard about what you'd need to do to know what the right SNA1
hash is for my hypothetical funny-once commit at the time you generate
the final version of this changelog comment about the
reversion. You'll get it, and when you do you might actually laugh.

The second problem is that it's not future-proof. Someday we might
have to change VCSes again; git is the *fifth*, after RCS CVS Arch bzr.
It would be unwise to assume that nobody will ever have a better idea.

At that time it would be a Really Good Thing if as few of our commit
refs as possible are opaque magic cookies - and in order to translate
them to whatever new commit-ref format we'll *still* have to go
through a semantic equivalent of revision stamps!

Thus, it seems best to me to just land on a VCS-independent and
human-readable version-stamp format and stay there, treating VCS-specific
commit-refs as a practice flaw to be avoided.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>