Ehh. Exactly like the bzr numbers? You have to have access to the original
repo to name it.
So your point is?
If you do
git log v2.6.17
in a kernel repository, you'll see exactly what I see - because you'll
have gotten the tags, aka the "easy revision names".
Now, I'm obviously biased, but the thing is, git really does do this
right. No meaningless numbers. You give _meaningful_ revision names, and
they can be extremely powerful.
And no, it's not just tags or the raw SHA1 numbers. You can do
relationships like
git log HEAD~5..
which means "show the log for everything since five parents ago" (which is
_not_ the same as "show the last five revisions", because one of them may
have been a merge, and brought in a lot more of new commits).
Or, you can say
git diff mybranch@{2.days.ago}..nextbranch
which says exactly what you'd read it as: show the diff between what
"mybranch" looked like 2 days ago and what "nextbranch" looks like right
now.
Or, since the namespace is the same for commit history _and_ for actual
file contents, and since some commands don't need commits, you can decide
to name not a revision, but a specific file or subdirectory in a revision,
and do things like
git -p grep -1 request_irq v2.6.17~2:drivers/char
where the "revision" is not a commit revision at all, it's a _tree_
revision, because we've looked up the revision for "v2.6.17~2" (which
means "the grandparent of the tag 2.6.17"), and then within that commit we
looked up the tree "drivers/char", and then we grepped (recursively) for
the string "request_irq" within that subtree (with one line of context),
and then we paginated the output through "less" (or whatever your pager is
set to).
In other words, yes, the above does _exactly_ what you'd expect it to do.
The fact is, nobody ever uses the SHA1 names directly in their normal
work. You'd use the branch names, tag-names, or some relationship operator
like "this long ago" or "the parent of" or similar).
The only time you use actual SHA1 names is when you tell somebody _else_
something. Or when you use "gitk" to look something up, and select a
commit, and then paste that commit name into "git show" (which is
obviously telling "somebody else" - it's communicating between two
programs).
There's simply no reason to ever use the SHA1 names directly normally. But
they are there, and they are the _real_ revision numbers, and they
actually have real meaning between different repositories.
So that "git grep" example above is actually 100% equivalent to
git -p grep -1 request_irq 3ff4e205e1
but why would I ever write that? That's just insane. But in case you care,
the way I got that "3ff4e205e1" number, it was just by doing
git rev-parse v2.6.17~2:drivers/char
and cutting-and-pasting the first ten hex-digits to make sure I had
enough of a name to make it unique.
So the SHA1 names always exist, and they are what git _internally_ uses,
but you'd normally not use them that much in your daily life.
They are great for explaining things, though. For example, when somebody
reports a bug, and has used "git bisect" to figure out where the bug
started happening, that's when the "real name" matters - since we normally
didn't tag that commit as being buggy when we created it ;)
So that's when you'd say: "I bisected the problem, and it started
happening in commit 0123456789abcdef". And now everybody with a git
repository of the kernel can just look it up locally by
cutting-and-pasting that one number.
Actually, git does something even better.
Git allows the repository to be split up.
You can get a git repository on a CD or DVD, and do
git clone -l -s /mount/cdrom myrepo
and that "-s" means that the new "myrepo" actually is linked to the
original CDROM repository, and you can now _commit_ stuff and make changes
in myrepo, even though all the old history is on that CD-ROM. It won't add
any unnecessary stuff at all to the new repo.
Or, you could do the "totally naked" checkout, so that the whole
repository is somewhere else (if that "somewhere else" is the CD-ROM, you
obviously cannot change anything ;)
Or you can have <n> different repositories that are all related, and all
contain just the part that _they_ care about.
Linus
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