Subject: Re: VCS comparison table

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:53:17 +0200

Aaron Bentley wrote:
> James Henstridge wrote:

>> Why do you continue to repeat this argument?  No one is claiming that
>> a revision number by itself, as Bazaar uses them, is a global
>> identifier.  In fact, we keep on saying that they only have meaning in
>> the context of a branch.
> 
> And, unlike git, Bazaar branches are all independent entities[1], and
> they each have a URL.
> 
> So:
> 
> http://code.aaronbentley.com/bzrrepo/bzr.ab 1695
> 
> is a name for
> 
> [email-masked]
> 
> And it does not depend on any other branch, especially not bzr.dev
> 
> Since:
> 1. anyone with write access to the urls can create them
> 2. anyone with read access to the urls can read them
> 3. the maintainers of the mainline have no control over them
>    (except as provided by 1)
> 
> these identifiers are not centralized.

If you don't use centralized numbers (i.e. always refering to bzr.dev,
either by using always (bzr.dev URL, revno), or by using "merge" for
bzr.dev and "pull" for rest), the numbers are volatile. If URL vanishes,
then (URL, revno) to revid mapping is no longer valid. Yeah, I know,
cool URI don't change...

Besides, you need [constant] network access for this mapping.
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland