hg, git, fossil, ...

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
> But then what do you do if you need to checkout an intermediate
> revision of the project that isn't tagged? This need does arise. You
> can't just checkout the revision you want of a particular component,
> because that old revision of that component may not be compatible with
> the other components at HEAD. Even if it is, you're still checking out
> a version of the repository that never actually existed. You can't
> expect to reproduce behavior at a particular revision if you can't
> even consistently recreate the revision.

See, that's where he and we fundamentally disagree. My view, your
view, git's view, and hg's view, is that all files in a repo are
intrinsically linked - that "checking out an intermediate revision"
means checking out that revision across the entire source tree.
Marko's view is that you check out an intermediate revision of the one
failing file. In my experience, you can't always say which is the
failing file, and even if you can, you can't just check out an old
version of that file and expect it to work with the new versions of
everything else, because there WILL be parallel changes - and lots of
them.

ChrisA