Re: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 05:55:43 -0400
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
> > > 1) People are continuing to embed bzr revision numbers like
> > >    r99634.2.576 and r102428 in comments.  Do not do this.  
> > 
> > There's no easy way to refer to an old commit in an unequivocal way.
> 
> Its date and committer is pretty unambiguous.

But less than useful when you need to look up that commit by that
spec.  AFAIK, we don't have VC commands that can look up a commit
given such a spec, so it requires tedious manual work.

> > > 2) "eliz@gnu.org-20101113210758-8ml5kibjtza5ysmb" Um.  What the *hell*?
> > 
> > It's a bzr revision-id.  You can use it in "bzr log" or any other bzr
> > command that accepts a revision spec.
> 
> Well, at least that makes it less arbitrary.  But still soon to become
> meaningless, and I still have to fix it.

You already have other such references in the logs, so I was quite
sure that problem was solved.

These revision-ids are in fixed format, so there should be no need for
heuristics in finding the corresponding commit, nor do I see a need
for a list of conversions when the revision is referenced by such an
ID.  This is why I added them in the first place in this case: to make
your job easier, not harder.

> One I have the location of one of these, it's a simple regex
> transformation to turn it into a <RFC3339-date>!<committer-email>
> portable revision stamp.  The expensive part will be finding them all.

With revision-ids, it's not supposed to be expensive.

> And I can't do the replacement mechanically, because this: a reference
> pair consisting of a short revision ID and one of these long-form ones
> would get turned into two duplicate version stamps.

You can replace the "dotted" revno with nothing in this case.

> Avoiding that is going to take wearying handhacking, and I am unhappy
> that it is required.  I didn't ask everyone to start using portable revision
> stamps months ago because I like hearing myself talk - there have been
> real consequences because people didn't, and now I'm going to have to
> write more machinery to just to be sure I've *found* all these
> goddamned long-form IDs so I can patch them out manually.  With
> conversion overhead making my tests take forever I figure I'm looking
> at maybe five days of intermittent boring shit-work to cope with this.

Why do you run this conversion regularly at all?  Why not do it once
on the D-Day?

> > Is it possible to write a command to do this?
> 
> I know how to do it using a script wrapper around git log.  The
> central bit of magic is this:
> 
> git log -1 --pretty='%ci!%ce' $1
> 
> The output from that needs trivial editing in the date part.

This produces the local time, while we need UTC (a.k.a. "Zulu").  Is
there a way to have a UTC time?