Re: Referring to revisions in the git future.

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> Good morning, David.
>
> On Sat, Nov 01, 2014 at 08:49:34AM +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
>> It's not like anybody's going to want to type off "abbreviations" by
>> hand anyway: too error-prone.
>
> I'm going to want to do this, that's why I started this thread.  Using a
> computer to kill and yank such a number is going to be such a downer.  Do
> you also kill and yank a variable name each time you need to type it in,
> or do you just type it?
>
> Likely, I'm not going to be able to do this.  Remembering and typing in a
> revision number is trivial: two chunks of memory - one for the bit that
> slowly changes "118" the other for the "220" at the end.  With 40 digit
> hex strings, even abbreviated, it's going to be 6 or 7 chunks to
> memorise.  As you say, this will be error-prone.
>
>> Just paste the full thing.  Really.  I've been developing for years
>> with Git, and that's just what everybody does most of the time.
>
> Because they have to, not because it's their preferred way of working.

Do you really think you know me better than I do?

If you do, you can just continue this discussion in your imagination and
not bother the list with it.  I've worked with sequential numbers for
decades.  Everybody did in the time of RCS and CVS.  I've worked with
Git and SHA-1 for quite some time, too.

You didn't apparently.  And yet you think yourself more qualified than I
am to tell people about _my_ motivations?

SHA1 is _great_ for mailing lists, by the way.  You plug in an SHA1 into
a mailing list search, and out fall all relevant mails.  Try that with a
sequence number.  You plug in an SHA1 of some commit with inscrutable
commit message missing an issue number into an issue tracker, and out
falls the message reporting the closing of the issue with a particular
commit.  It's a real life-saver for finding stuff again.  Neither
abbreviated SHA1 nor sequence numbers work for that.

-- 
David Kastrup