Subject: Re: newbie questions about git design and features (some wrt hg)

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2007 19:19:28 +0100

Brendan Cully wrote:
> On Friday, 02 February 2007 at 08:42, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> 
>> The mistake seems to be to think that tags get "versioned", and are part 
>> of the tree history. That's insane. It means that you can never have a tag 
>> to a newer tree than the one you are on.
> 
> The tags you use can simply be those from the tip of the repository,
> regardless of which revision you've currently checked out.

_Can_ be or _are_ (in Mercurial)? Besides, there can be more than one
tip of repository (branch are tips of history), and making set of tags
dependent on which branch you are on is not a good idea either.

>> Tags are *independent* of history. They must be. They are "outside" 
>> history, since the whole point of tags are to point to history.
> 
> Tags have history too. They are added at particular times by
> particular people, and sometimes changed (this wouldn't happen in an
> ideal world, but it happens). It's a shame not to be able to find this
> history.

That is what reflogs are for, although you usually don't enable this
for tags (because tags are meant to be immutable, especially signed
release tags).

Besides, in git annotated tags have tagger info, i.e. who and when
created a tag.

Besides tags point to history. Having them inside history is abstraction
breakage, IMVHO.
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland