git branch help?

[Peter Hutterer]

On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 08:10:06AM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > For sequential commit numbering, try "git describe".
> 
> Nobody actually uses those numbers though 

statements with "nobody" or "everybody" can be easily disproven so you might
want to reword or narrow down your definition of "nobody". I've used
git-describe quite a bit and it can be useful.

> (and in fact I doubt those numbers 
> can be used in all the ways SVN revision IDs can be used). What everyone 
> uses is hashes, leaving you to wonder whether deadbeef or c0cac01a is the 
> newer revision (assuming that both are snapshots from master or at least 
> from the same branch, which is usually the case when comparing 2 packaged 
> snapshots).

I think this may be the main issue here - there is no meaning of "newer" in
git. Don't rely on it an you'll be fine. What matters is whether a change is
in a repository or not. Which one is newer hardly ever matters.

> > The problems with CVS were amply explained there, but it's less clear to
> > me whether there were compelling reasons to choose git over (e.g.) SVN +
> > git-svn or the people involved just happened to like distributed version
> > control, as I do.
> 
> Sure they do, but the problem is that they're FORCING their preference onto 
> everyone, whereas using SVN would have allowed them to work their way (using 
> SVK or git-svn) without breaking our workflow, and SVN has all the required 
> features (e.g. atomic commits and thus repository-wide revision IDs).
> 
> Sadly, more and more projects are getting infected by the git virus, KDE is 
> also moving to git, several other upstream projects already did. :-(

This sounds a bit like an "everyone else is wrong" argument which is usually
quite hard to defend in public.

Cheers,
  Peter