Re: Bazaar references complicate the git transition

["Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>]

David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>:
> Eric,
> 
> Here's an idea - why don't you just tag each referenced revision in git with the bzr revision id, e.g.,
> 
> git tag 'bzr/115967'  de7d9800
> 
> That would make it trivial and seamless to find a reference later on.  
> I would update the change log files to use the same bzr/ prefix.  
> 
> You can do this after the transition is done, and if people don't like it, they can undo it in the future.
> 
> - David

That's certainly a much, much better idea than git notes or a textfile not
tied into the VCS at all.

In doing these conversions, though, I've become use to thinking like
an archivist concerned with very long timescales. I find myself asking
questions like this: how is the translation choice I make in *this*
VCS conversion going to affect the *next* one, the one we don't
foresee?  I don't want to be the person that the next guy to do a
repository lift curses for shortsightedness. 

What you're suggesting seems to me like the best medium-timescale choice
anyone has offered.  But here are some longer-scale problems with it:

1. Tags are much more fragile than IDs in commit comments.  They could
easily get deleted by someone's typo or moment of inattention.

2. What happens when people have forgotten the syntax of a Bazaar
revision ID?  It's just a bare decimal integer, after all. Suppose a
future VCS also uses commit IDs in this form?

Thinking about scenarios like this is why I invented action stamps.
This is an action stamp:

     2014-01-11T16:22:20!esr@thyrsus.com

My practice for the last several conversions I've done has been to change
all native revision IDs inline to these timestamp!committer pairs. I think
this has good robustness properties.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>