Promoting the use of Mercurial; was: Re: gnome dvcs survey results

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:09:27 -0600, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
>On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 23:43 -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
>> This assumes that tag _are_ history. Another way to think about
>> things is to say that tags are a *pointer* to history. Some
>> historiams claim September 4, 476 as the fall of the Roman Empire;
>> others use 378 A.D., still others 410 A.D., and others go as late as
>> 565 A.D.  *History* is immutable; what tags we place on history isn't
>> necessarily part of history.
>
> Sure, tags are just pointers. But *tagging* is an action that is
> history-relevant, precisely because you want to ask questions like
> "who created or changed this pointer, when and why?"

Precisely.  The tagging operation *is* history.

I have worked in jobs where 'sliding a tag' was needed some times.  In
some of these cases I used "hacks" to keep a side-history of who slided
a tag, when it was done and why.  With 'hg tag' this isn't necessary
because every tagging operation carries all this extra information in
its changelog :)