Re: On the popularity of git [Was: Git question: when using branches, how does git treat working files when changing branches?]

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus@rath.org> writes:

> On Oct 31 2015, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>>
>>> More generally, Git's main problem is that it breaks almost every
>>> human habit gained with the other VCSes: instead of an easily
>>> remembered numerical version IDs you have those inhuman hashes
>>
>> Shrug.  In a distributed version control system, numerical version IDs
>> don't make sense.
>
> They make a lot of sense if you don't require them to be constant over
> time. Mercurial solves this beautifully. It has hashes if you need to
> constant identifier, but if you just want to refer to the commit that
> got printed/created/referred to by the command you typed 30 seconds ago,
> you can use its handy numerical id.

HEAD~2 works just fine in Git.  So does "HEAD@{30 seconds ago}" though
one would rarely want to use that particular reference.  I _do_ use
something like "issue4517@{1 day ago}" as a reasonably stable reference
point occasionally.

-- 
David Kastrup