Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> writes:

> The second problem is that it's not future-proof. Someday we might
> have to change VCSes again; git is the *fifth*, after RCS CVS Arch
> bzr.

Being friendly to Arch mirrors does not imply that Emacs actually went
through Arch.

> It would be unwise to assume that nobody will ever have a better idea.
>
> At that time it would be a Really Good Thing if as few of our commit
> refs as possible are opaque magic cookies - and in order to translate
> them to whatever new commit-ref format we'll *still* have to go
> through a semantic equivalent of revision stamps!
>
> Thus, it seems best to me to just land on a VCS-independent and
> human-readable version-stamp format and stay there, treating
> VCS-specific commit-refs as a practice flaw to be avoided.

I disagree.  The whole point of the repo conversion is to make it more
convenient for the _current_ version control system to work with the
history and you are proposing to change to a format that is a nuisance
for _every_ version control system rather than to every version control
system _apart_ from the one being in active use.

When we change to something else but Git for the canonical VCS, we'll
want to convert all those references to whatever we are moving to in
order to make dealing with history reasonably nice.

-- 
David Kastrup