commit IDs in changelog messsages (was: Introductory mail)

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 10:11:15AM -0500, James Westby wrote:
> > > You mean [fc5473a06be960382582ddbfb40e2a5f824be122] don't you?
> > No, why? Short commit IDs are usually enough in Git.
> Why not use [f] then?

Well, even thought the likelihood of clashes increase trivially with
time, we are in the context of changelogs which are made of
timestamp-ed entries.

Hence it would be relatively simple, the day that a clash does occur,
to disambiguate it by choosing the commit which is closest to the
timestamp of the changelog entry referencing it. It wouldn't even be
necessary to do that always, you can be lazy and do that only upon
conflicts.

To do that you will need connectivity to the repository, but without
that the id is useless any how, and I also observe that most $DVCS
help us in this respect, because we know that the full history is
always available attached to each commit.

Am I overlooking some serious intricacy?

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
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