[Nut-upsdev] referring to earlier SVN commits

[Charles Lepple]

On Nov 13, 2012, at 3:37 PM, Arnaud Quette wrote:

> Fix Buildbot failures on commit r3776

One small request in the commit messages: please mention exact commit numbers only if the commit is hard to find. Something like "fix buildbot failures from previous commit" is specific enough, without making the reader look up a specific commit number.

The reason is that it will be harder to look up a given SVN revision ID after the repository is converted to Git. I think Eric S. Raymond might have suggested this when he was going through the old SVN commits, but even if not, I think it will make things clearer.

Eric also suggests using a VCS-agnostic "action stamp" format to refer to commits, but I think it's a little verbose, and at the moment, only reposurgeon can parse them (specifically, Trac and gitk are blissfully unaware of them). I have a patch for reposurgeon that tries to address the readability issue - more on that later.

From the reposurgeon manual:

> An action stamp is an RFC3339 timestamp, followed by a '!', followed by a committer email address, followed by ':' and a 1-origin sequence number if the date/time pair is not unique in the repository; it refers to a commit without being VCS-specific. Thus, instead of "commit 304a53c2" or "r2355", "2011-10-25T15:11:09Z!fred at foonly.com".
 - http://www.catb.org/~esr/reposurgeon/reposurgeon.html

Also, once we transition to native Git repositories, you will be able to amend the most recent commit before you push. This should reduce the number of "typo in previous commit" messages.

-- 
Charles Lepple
clepple at gmail