[MERGE/RFC] Dotted-decimal revision numbers in 'bzr log'

[Daniel Parks]

Peanut gallery, IMHO, etc. disclaimers apply.

On Sep 27, 2006, at 12:43 AM, Robert Collins wrote:

> Assigning branches from the merge point has the following
> characteristics:

>  * the numbers assigned will stay short as long as the merge size is
> small. Large merges may have many branches come in at once, and the
> number of branches needed concurrently will grow to match.

I imagine the primary use case for dotted-decimal revnos is to allow  
easy access to revisions that were merged into a branch. (Easy in the  
sense that they are easy to recognize and type.) So, this seems like  
a significant advantage.

This is really the only reason I'm writing this. :)

I'm curious what the other use cases are. I can imagine wanting to  
diff revision x against whatever before and after a merge. Perhaps  
this is more common than I think?

> Assigning branches from the branch point has the following
> characteristics:

>  * The numbers assigned to each revision are based on the origin of  
> the
> revision : they provide the origin-of-the-revision rather than the
> merged-into-branch data. So the number data is complementary to the  
> user
> show layout.

That's cool, but I'm not sure how useful that would be. I suspect I  
would be able to interpret the string of numbers in only the simplest  
of cases.

It seems another command, or another tool could more easily display  
the branching structure.

> My preference is for the assign-from-branch approach because of the
> greater stability. (stability across merges means they can usually be
> used across merges).

It seems to me that greater stability is worth fairly little -- it's  
not completely stable, so the user still can't rely on that stability.


Daniel