Subject: bug#22083: 25.0.50; hg: adding tag enhances the rev, modeline does not reflect

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Dec 2015 18:13:09 +0200

> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
> Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2015 17:46:49 +0200
> 
> On 12/04/2015 05:37 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > RCS does.  SRC is just RCS in disguise, so it has them as well.
> 
> All right, then. But are they used often?

I don't know.  But with RCS, the branch and the revision are the same
thing, i.e. the revision number also encodes the branch.  So it isn't
important really.  (Same with CVS.)

> Branches are a well-used feature in Git. If the majority of users of a 
> different VCS X are not aware of branches, and don't use them, showing 
> the current branch everywhere might not be very useful.

I think all the 3 of the modern dVCSes have branches as very important
feature and the users are aware of them.

> > The revision number for a VCS that has it.  Something close, like the
> > output of "git describe", for those that don't.
> 
> 'git describe' output can be fairly long (e.g. 1.11.0-55-gegegege)

We could lose the gegegege part.

> for one, I'm not very comfortable with it (how useful exactly is it to 
> know that the branch is XY commits ahead of the latest tag?).

There's nothing else in Git that's comparable to a revision number, I
think.