Re: Repo cpnversion progress report

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> I hear the argument about forensics, but the Bazaar revision numbers
> are no more helpful for that than the action stamps.

As someone who regularly spelunks back decades, I'd prefer keeping these 
stamps as small as possible.  Even 
"2003-07-05T12:41:24!Roland.Winkler@physik.uni-erlangen.de" will cause 
hassles, and I especially wouldn't want to read and digest monsters 
along the lines of what someone else proposed, e.g., 
"1985-04-18T00:49:29!jimb@redhat.com (bzr 1) (CVS 4.35.2.1) (RCS 1.71) 
(emacs-backup ~107~)".  It doesn't scale for a revision string to 
contain all the names that the revision has ever had, for all the 
version-control systems we've ever used.

It may be that leaving commentary alone is the simplest and best way to 
keep it short and readable, with a map elsewhere that converts old 
notation.  That being said, I'm willing to give your approach a try.  As 
long as the complete history is available somewhere and is documented, 
and it's not too much work to use it, it should be OK.

PS.  In that 1985 example, the email address jimb@redhat.com is 
ahistorical, as Red Hat didn't exist in 1985.  That info is taken 
straight from the current bzr repository.  Most likely the repository 
was made ahistorical during an earlier conversion, unfortunately.