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 17:35:58 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> 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.
> 
> bidi was mentioned as an example of a task suitable for a long lived
> feature branch (and for working on a team, or at least publish the
> branch and accept occasional contributions.) I was not implying that
> bidi was actually managed that way.

And I was trying to say that you won't find more than a very small
number of examples of long-living (as opposed to long dead) branches.

> >> 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.
> 
> No, you see no signs because private branches live on private machines,
> which is precisely one of the specific characteristics of a dVCS. I have
> two branches where I do development since a year ago. I'm sure you
> wasn't aware of their existence until now :-)

And I have 3 branches, so what?  As long as we don't push or pull or
merge from/to those as a matter of routine, Emacs is not a distributed
project.  It has a potential of becoming one, but to make that happen,
we will need much more than use revision IDs.

> > 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.
> 
> Precisely, what I described above was a setup where having the "other
> branch" (say better "the other brancheS") is a burden. So I don't have
> them.

The above works with URLs as well, of course.  You don't need to have
the branches locally.