VCS comparison table

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> > 
> > Normally, you'd just use the branch-name. Nobody ever uses the SHA1's 
> > directly.
> 
> With the exception of having sometimes commit-ids in the commit messages,
> for example "Fixes bug introduced by aabbcc00" (although usually you just
> write "Fixes bug in some_function in some_file"), and automatically
> generated 
>   This reverts d119e3de13ea1493107bd57381d0ce9c9dd90976 commit.

Yes. But in both cases, that's usually because you literally ended up 
having the commit name because somebody else (which _can_ be you) searched 
for it (with something like "bisect") and gave it to you.

So even that case is really about communicating a stable name from one 
place (the "find the bug") to another (the "revert the buggy commit").

So yes, _communication_ should always happen by full SHA1's, because those 
are the only thing that always remain stable.

(The fact that "gitk" and I think "gitweb" can then turn them into 
hyperlinks in the commit message is obviously one reason we then tend to 
give them such prominent visibility - they actually end up being very 
useful later on).

In bzr, either you don't get the hyperlinks, or you need to use the 
non-simple name in the commit messages, since the simple names don't 
actually work. Either way, it's an inferior setup.

			Linus