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

[Mark Wooding <mdw@distorted.org.uk>]

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

> BTW does Mercurial have tags?

Yes.  Mercurial stores tags in text files, one per line, mapping the tag
name to a SHA1 hash of the tagged revision.  There are two files of
tags: `local' tags go into .hg/tags (or somesuch) and don't get copied
by clone; global tags go into .hgtags and do get copied (of course,
since they're part of the source tree).

If I may be opinionated for a bit: this is barking for two reasons:

  * The tags files grow by having lines added to the bottom.  Files of
    this kind are almost ideal for causing merge conflicts, and there's
    no automatic means for resolving them.  (I actually wrote a custom
    tags merger recently -- if anyone wants it, just mail me.)

  * If I visit a tag, and then decide I want to visit some other, more
    recent tag, I'm screwed because it obviously didn't exist in that
    old revision.  Tying tags to the revision history in this way is
    truly daft.

-- [mdw]