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

[Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:

>  > Not really.  Since r43 is a reference to a revision _local_ to the
>  > merged branch, it is easy to interpret it as a reference to 42.1.1.
> 
> You only know it's local to the branch if you have global knowledge of
> the whole project.  But if you do have that knowledge, it doesn't much
> matter how you make these references.

No, the assumption is that the numeric references to revisions are
either to the mainline or to the local branch.  I think these cover
90% of the cases.  Others would have to be more explicit references
(either by revision id or by specific description of the branch/date
etc.)

So, a reference to revision 43 inside a branch that starts from
revision 42 is very very likely to be a local reference.  In the very
odd case where the author is trying to refer to the revision 43 of the
trunk (which is sort of the in "future"), he/she would probably
describe it as "revision 43 of the trunk".

If there is a reference to revision 40, then it would have to be
revision 40 of the mainline, because this branch starts only at
revision 42.

So, the two cases that are important seem to be easily discernible and
problem doesn't seem to be as bad as it is being made out to be.

But then I haven't seen all the weird cases that might occur in a
large multi-developer project.

Cheers,
Uday