Re: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult

[Eric S. Raymond]

Yuri Khan <address@hidden>:
> Neither does author/timestamp uniquely identify a commit in a
> rebaseful commit graph. But at least the commits having the same
> author/timestamp all conceptually represent the same change.

That is an interesting point.

We are still at a point where I could, theoretically, change this.
I could run the through the revision-ID mapping replacing committer-based
version stamps with author-based version stamps.

I am not sure this would be a good idea, though. It wouldn't actually
eliminate the multiple-target problem in searches using revision stamps 
as keys; the best it would do is support an argument that the ambiguity
might not matter as much.  Maybe - usually when a branch is rebased 
on to trunk it's because someone is treating *that* as a conceptual 
unit too, representing a feature landing.  

And we really aren't guaranteed that future VCSes will have the
distinction; darcs, or something else like it based on a patch
algebra, could still win.

For now, I ask everyone to generate committer-based version stamps.  If
we switch, I'll do it in one big operation.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>