Re: Please don't use revision numbers on commit messages (and elsewhere).

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Uday S Reddy writes:

 > I am still trying to understand how bad this problem is.

It's this bad:

Right now, you and I simultaneously clone the mainline at r42.  You
commit, creating r43, because as far as bzr knows, you're on the
mainline.  Oops, you missed something, and you commit your r44, with
the message "Fix bug introduced in r43."  While you're fixing the bug,
I commit and push, and my commit becomes mainline r43.  Now when you
pull and merge, your commits that used to be on the (local) mainline
with revnos r43 and r44 are now off the mainline and have revnos
r42.1.1 and r42.1.2, and the commit message is now a dastardly attack
on my reputation. ;-)

Yes, if something is already in the master repo, you can refer to it
by revno, as long as you never intend to push it anywhere else, or
allow others to pull from your branch (you can't be sure that they
have the same history you do).  But you can't refer to your own
commits by revno until they've been pushed to the master.