On 10/18/06, Carl Worth <<a href="mailto:cworth@cworth.org">cworth@cworth.org</a>> wrote:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> If in practice, nobody does the mirroring "pull" operation then how are the numbers useful? For example, given your examples above, if I'm understanding the concepts and terminology correctly, then if A and B both "merge" from each other (and don't "pull") then they will each end up with identical DAGs for the revision history but totally distinct numbers. Correct? So in that situation the numbers will not help A and B determine that they have identical history or even identical working trees. So what good are the numbers? I can see that the numbers would have applicability with reference to a single repository, (or equivalently a mirror of that repository), but no utility as soon as there is any distributed development happening. -Carl </blockquote></div> The numbers are good for your own sanity on your local branch, to simplify working with the revisions like displaying the diff for a specific revision  `bzr diff -r57..58` Its there so that everything does not happed at once (in a manner of speaking) To determine what is different between branches do  a `bzr missing` and that will tell you exactly what is different between the two. Its important for the user to realize that the revno is not a globally unique revision number. So what we currently do at work is we specify the revno on the main-line branch (which is hosted on a central server). Maybe it will be nicer to use tags to destribute a baseline among all the branches, so everybody will know where their fix was implemented, and how much their branch has changed since a specific tag  (I'm thinking a tag like ' v1.2.3' indicating a stable baseline) -- -- The source is strong in this one.