[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps
From: |
Stephen J. Turnbull |
Subject: |
Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps |
Date: |
Sun, 14 Sep 2014 16:34:01 +0900 |
Eric S. Raymond writes:
> Both of Harald's objections are, alas, sound.
Only because your requirements are unsound. It's not possible to
specify a revision compactly, let alone uniquely, in a "preorder of
patches" VCS like Darcs. (Unlike the example below, it's not always
going to be the case that you can refer to a particular patch as a
summary of the situation.) So broad portability across VCSes is out.
And it's not really necessary: at any given time there's only going to
be one canonical VCS for a project, so references can (and IMO should)
use that VCS's identifier.
Constructing a reference that is reasonably accurate and meaningful to
humans is also very difficult (at least). Even restricting yourself
to a single VCS like git, there may be insufficient metadata to remove
ambiguity. On the other hand, although for academics "Raymond [1997]"
is a form that makes a lot of sense, in referencing commits in a VCS
it's nowhere near as useful. Human memory for commit content has a
halflife of about 2 weeks -- and that's assuming you were both
following emacs-devel and emacs-commits at the time. Then you go and
look for it -- guess what, grepping the ChangeLog doesn't work if (as
in many projects, and I understand that many hope Emacs will
eventually be one of them) you don't have ChangeLogs.
I really don't see what's wrong with
2014-09-15 Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
* JOKES (dumb_joke_internal): Revert Eric Raymond's commit of
2014-04-01 [deadbeefcafefeeddefaceddeafadd0123456789].
It was a funny-once, Man.
Or whatever formatting you want, as long as the SHA1 ref is easily
parsable out of the text.
Regards,
- Re: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult, (continued)
- Re: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult, David Kastrup, 2014/09/12
- resolving ambiguity in action stamps (was: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult), Joshua Judson Rosen, 2014/09/12
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps (was: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult), Eric S. Raymond, 2014/09/12
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Joshua Judson Rosen, 2014/09/12
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps (was: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult), Stephen J. Turnbull, 2014/09/12
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps (was: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult), Eric S. Raymond, 2014/09/13
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps (was: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult), Stephen J. Turnbull, 2014/09/13
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Harald Hanche-Olsen, 2014/09/13
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Eric S. Raymond, 2014/09/13
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Yuri Khan, 2014/09/13
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps,
Stephen J. Turnbull <=
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Eric S. Raymond, 2014/09/14
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, David Kastrup, 2014/09/14
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2014/09/14
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, David Kastrup, 2014/09/14
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2014/09/14
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Eric S. Raymond, 2014/09/14
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2014/09/14
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, David Kastrup, 2014/09/14
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Eric S. Raymond, 2014/09/14
- Re: resolving ambiguity in action stamps, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2014/09/14