Dotted revno "algebra"

[Brian de Alwis]

On 3-May-2010, at 10:37 AM, Francis J. Lacoste wrote:
> There is no difference for me between 8564.1.32.1 and 
> launchpad at pqm.canonical.com-20100501085755-q23vnwvz5it2xs8v
> 
> That's to mean that, if I want to do something with a dotted revision, I'll 
> have to find it first in a bzr log output, and then copy it. Because it doesn't 
> mean anything to me. 

So what I like about the dotted revnos is that it provides the following information (in order of usefulness):

  1) that the change was brought in as a result of a merge;

  2) a relative idea of the age of the commit: since 'bzr commit' reports the new mainline revno, I can guess at the age.  This is very coarse-grained and probabilistic, I admit, but it can be useful to know if the change in question is from > 2 months vs in the last month.

  3) what commit the change was relative to.

I don't use them often though.

Brian.