[joeyh]

If adding a shell script to your development environment results in pain every time you need to set it up, that says you haven't automated setting up the environment. One great way to automate it is to put all such scripts (surely this would not be the only one?) and other files in a version controlled repository; then you just have one more thing to check out.

(If checking out one more thing results in pain, you should think about automating the checkout too... This line of thinking has resulted in me keeping everything in git and using a single `mr` command (google will find it) to check out all my respositories when I'm setting up a new account.)

Revision numbers are not impossible with DVCS; bzr has repo-local revision numbers. But once a number becomes longer than 3 digits, I cut and paste it anyway; if I'm already pasting, the longer size of git's sha1s doesn't matter.

[steveklabnik]

Also, you only need as much of the hash as neccesary to identify the commit. Generally 5 or 6 digits is long enough.