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

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Fri, 01 Apr 2011 03:20:14 +0200
> 
> Anyone can setup a public repo anytime, anywhere. Let's think of a
> long-lived feature branch of the type of lexbind or bidi

The bidi branch was never alive for a long time.  If anything, it was
_dead_ for a long time.  Once serious work on bidi support was
resumed, and it was in a shape that could be used without crashing
every several seconds, it was merged with the trunk.

In general, the current experience with branches seems to be that no
one but their developer(s), usually a single individual, uses them,
until very close to a merge.  The only exception is the release
branch, where the maintainers take care of these references.

So it looks like you are asking everyone and their dog to pay dearly
_now_ for a mostly theoretical problem, that could potentially become
a real problem in some vague future.  Good luck expecting that people
will abide by your request!

> On a distributed project, you don't know how many active branches exist
> out there.

Emacs is not currently a distributed project, and I see no signs that
it is going to become one.

> Let me expand with an example based on my past* experience. I have a
> number of heterogeneous machines (different OS, varying network
> connectivity, etc) and on all of them I have Emacs running (of
> course!). I've my private branch with some customizations, which is what
> I use for building and installing Emacs on all those machines. Keeping
> the private branch mirrored among all of them means work. Keeping
> mirrors for `trunk', emacs-23 and what-not is too much of a burden (last
> time I checked there was no simple & reliable method for synchronizing
> sets of branches across multiple platforms.) In theory, having just my
> private branch and merging trunk into it from time to time would be
> enough. But then those commits messages referencing other revisions by
> their numbers doesn't fit, as trunk's revision #110000 has another
> number on my private branch.

It is very easy to see that revision, even if it is on the other
branch, assuming that the referenced branch is in your repo, with the
"revno:NNN:/path/to/branch" revision identifier.

> Do you prefer to wait until the problem has manifested itself on all its
> crudeness? :-)

That's one way of putting it.  Another one would be "don't try to
solve problems that don't exist."