Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Proposal for human readable revision IDs

[Andy Jones]

I've only been using Monotone for a few weeks, and then only to
evaluate it, but already I've experienced +dozens+ of instances of
reading a revision ID out ... to myself.  I +never+ copy and paste. 
For example, I often make notes about the revision history, and that
involves writing down at least part of the ID; I have to say the thing
over to myself just so I can write it down right.

I appreciate that many people copy and paste - all that means is that
we should use underscores to seperate the digit groups.


On 12/09/05, Steven Grimm <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 12/09/05, Jon Bright <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > I also agree with this. For me,
> >
> > 568b-2462-456e-9a57-4326-93df-936d-4835
> >
> > would be much more readable than
> >
> > 568b2462456e9a57432693df936d4835
> 
> To me, they're both meaningless gobbeldygook that I can't say out loud
> to someone when I want to tell them which recent checkin has a fix for
> their bug. I think the only differences between the two are that the
> first one takes less screen real estate and I can select the first one
> by double-clicking, which I can't reliably do with the hyphens there.
> 
> I guess it depends on what you want to do with revision IDs. It's not
> like you're ever actually *reading* one per se; it has no intrinsic
> meaning. There are only a few reasons I ever care about a revision ID in
> any version control system:
> 
> 1. To supply it to a version-control system command or another app
> (bug-tracking system, etc.) I doubt many people will ever type a hex ID
> in by hand, so hyphens don't matter here; you'll be cutting and pasting.
> And that's easier without the hyphens because they can act as word breaks.
> 
> 2. To refer to it verbally. Which is impractical with SHA1 IDs no matter
> how you render it; if I want to refer to a revision in speech I have to
> tag it.
> 
> 3. To compare it against another one. Only in one case out of four
> billion is it insufficient to compare, say, the first and last four
> digits of an SHA1 hash, which is easy enough to do without the hyphens.
> The chances of making a mistake in a visual comparison are orders of
> magnitude higher than the chances that any 8 digits will actually be the
> same between two hashes.
> 
> My vote (as a mere user of monotone, not yet a contributor) is to keep
> them as they are.
> 
> Is there any significant performance penalty to having zillions of tags
> in the system? I think most people's objections to the hashcodes would
> be be satisfied with a hook script that auto-tags revisions with a much
> shorter, likely-but-not-guaranteed unique, value at commit time
> (username + timestamp, DB name + autoincremented serial number, etc.) I
> know if I had that, I'd probably never refer to a hex revision ID. What
> happens when there's a name collision between tags during a synchronize,
> anyway?
> 
> -Steve
> 
> 
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