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Comment by anderskaseorg | Hacker News Reader

Git already has an ordering like this built in as ‘git describe’.

    $ git describe 593a2a5d0639b4b4f91ff6e6ffb64e72020f8fd8
    v2.34.1-83-g593a2a5d06

This commit is 83 commits after the v2.34.1 tag. Git accepts this identifier anywhere it would accept a commit hash, e.g.:

    $ git log v2.34.1-83-g593a2a5d06
    $ git show v2.34.1-83-g593a2a5d06:branch.c

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/commit/?id=v2.34....

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they want a global, presumably centralized, order

Describe works it’s way backwards to find a tag matching the search pattern. If you are checked out on origin/master and the tags come from the same centralized origin, then you will have a predictable global order.

It’s basically the same thing as rev-list that they do, except more readable, with tighter integration to tags and with the result usable as a commitish.

Neat - I periodically see those incremental ids show up in places but didn't realised they worked like commit ids. But I'm not surprised.

For all the interesting ways to name an object, see [0]:

  man 7 gitrevisions

and for this particular naming "describeOutput"

[0] https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/git-man/gitrevisions.7....

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