Re: Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Remove outdated comments from the regression test files.

On 28.11.2010 06:59, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 3:46 PM, Tom Lane<tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Robert Haas<robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>>> On Nov 27, 2010, at 2:49 PM, Bruce Momjian<bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
>>>> Who's going to be the first to say that being git-centric can't ever be
>>>> a bad thing? ;-)
>>
>>> At least for me, referring to it that way makes finding the original patch an order of magnitude faster (git show hash). YMMV.
>>
>> [ shrug... ] You need to take the long view here. We're not working on
>> the assumption that git is the last SCM this project will ever use.
>> Even granting that it is, I don't think git hashes are adequately stable;
>> loading the code into a different repository would likely result in new
>> hashes. And AFAIK there is no mechanism that would fix hash references
>> embedded in commit log messages (or the code).
>
> Well, if we ever did want to rewrite the entire development history
> (why?) I suppose we could rewrite SHA hashes in the commit messages at
> the same time. But I think one big advantage of git (or svn, or
> probably any other post-CVS VCS) is that it has unique IDs for
> commits. Referring to them as "the commit by so-and-so on
> such-and-such a date" just on the off chance that we might someday
> decide to replace those unique IDs with another set of unique IDs
> doesn't make much sense to me. It makes things more difficult now in
> the hope that, ten years from now when we switch systems again, it'll
> be easier to use unstructured text to construct a search command to
> root through the development history than it will be to map a git
> commit id onto a commit id in the new system. That's possible, but
> it's far from obvious. We are database professionals; we ought to
> believe in the value of unique keys.

Let's do both: "This fixes the bug introduced by the foobar patch from
Sep 12th (git commitid a2c23897bc).

I like to see the date of the referred patch in the commit message, to
get an immediate idea of whether it was a 5-year old change or something
from the previous day. But the commitid is also nice so you can
immediately copy-paste that without reading through the old commit logs.

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com