Just reading the manual yesterday and the obvious question came to mind.
Why SHA1 instead of serials?
The manual suggested that any reasonable alternative be offered. So here it is. The obvious alternative in my mind is a serial number. I understand that there's a problem in trying to provide globally unique serials without a central authority. It's the old space-time problem. How do you determine if two events occur at the same time if they don't occur in the same place? And the answer from physics is that you can't, really, because space and time are part of the same thing.
To provide globally unique serials, one would need to include some representation of the location at which an event occurred. In this case, I'd suggest the domain name of the machine involved. So something like 1:monotone.venge.com, 2:monotone.venge.com, etc. If each repository used it's own name, (presumably it's domain name in most cases), and kept it's own list of serials, wouldn't this both provide a guaranteed unique id as well as providing that oh-so-sought-after monotonically increasing number people so love to see?
--rich
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