I read through a bunch of questions asking about simple source code control tools and Git seemed like a reasonable choice. I have it up and running, and it works well so far. One aspect that I like about CVS is the automatic incrementation of a version number.

I understand that this makes less sense in a distributed repository, but as a developer, I want/need something like this.  Let me explain why:

I use Emacs. Periodically I go through and look for new versions of the Lisp source files for third-party packages. Say I&#39;ve got a file, foo.el, which, according to the header, is version 1.3; if I look up the latest version and see it&#39;s 1.143 or 2.6 or whatever, I know I&#39;m pretty far behind.

If instead I see a couple of 40-character hashes, I won&#39;t know which is later or get any idea of how much later it is. I would absolutely hate it if I had to manually check ChangeLogs just to get an idea of how out of date I am.

As a developer, I want to extend this courtesy, as I see it, to the people that use my output (and maybe I&#39;m kidding myself that anyone is, but let&#39;s leave that aside for a moment). I don&#39;t want to have to remember to increment the damn number myself every time, or a timestamp or something like that. That&#39;s a real PITA, and I know that from experience.

So what alternatives do I have? If I can&#39;t get an $Id:$ equivalent, how else can I provide what I&#39;m looking for?

I should mention that my expectation is that the end user will NOT have Git installed and even if they do, will not have a local repository (indeed, I expect not to make it available that way). 


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Moving from CVS to Git: $Id$ equivalent?