VCS comparison table

[Matthieu Moy]

Andreas Ericsson <ae at op5.se> writes:

> This I don't understand. Let's say Alice has revision-154 in her repo,
> located at alice.example.com. Let's say that commit is accessible with
> the url "alice.example.com:revision-154". Bob pulls from her repo into
> his own, which is located at bob.example.com.

Another equation can help.

Revision Identity != Revision Number.

$ bzr log --show-ids
------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 1
revision-id: Matthieu.Moy at imag.fr-20061017152029-4c5a2861bcf23b7d
committer: Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy at imag.fr>
branch nick: foo
timestamp: Tue 2006-10-17 17:20:29 +0200
message:
  some message


See, bzr has this unique revision identifier (not based on a hashsum).
The design choice of bzr is to hide it as much as possible from the
user interface.

Then, if I'm in the branch in which I typed this command, I can reffer
to this revision with simply

  bzr whatever -r 1

In the general case, I can access it with

  bzr whatever -r revid:Matthieu.Moy at imag.fr-20061017152029-4c5a2861bcf23b7d

(There's currently a lack in the UI to specify a remote revision-id,
but that's not a problem in the model itself)

bzr's internal use almost exclusively revision ID (ancestry
information is all about revision id), and revno are a UI layered on
top of it.

I don't have strong needs in revision control, but I actually never
encountered a case where I had to access a revision by providing its
ID. So, for people like me, revision numbers are sufficient, and they
are simple (for example, I can tell without running any command that
revision 42 is older than revision 56 in a particular branch).

-- 
Matthieu