Re: Use of "Action stamps" in commit messages

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Radon Rosborough <radon.neon@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2018 11:30:11 -0600
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>, 
> 	emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> >> Maybe I'm missing something, but -- if we change to a different VCS,
> >> we are going to have to rewrite all the history anyway. Why would it
> >> be difficult to have a filter that goes through and replaces all the
> >> Git commit IDs with the corresponding ones for the new VCS?
> >
> > Because it is hard for an automatic tool to tell Git commit IDs from
> > unrelated hexadecimal numbers.
> 
> The tool will know all the valid Git commit IDs, though. It could
> translate unambiguous prefixes of more than 12 characters (or
> something) automatically

Git SHA1 signatures don't require 12 digits, 7 are almost always
enough.  And then there's the output of "git describe" as a variant
that should also be supported.

> and then prompt the user to resolve the rest. It seems to me like
> translating the whole thing wouldn't be more than an afternoon's
> work—are there really that many hexadecimal numbers that happen to
> be prefixes of Git commit IDs in commit messages?

You are overly optimistic.  Last time we bumped into this, it required
a lot of non-trivial manual work.

> IOW, although there are complications, this is something that would
> only happen extremely rarely, and would only have to be done by one
> person, and probably won't even happen at all. Whereas the alternative
> solution requires all the developers to expend extra mental energy.

Some problems cannot be worked around.  Its just the way things are.