bzr keywords in source files

[Benjamin Franksen <benjamin.franksen@helmholtz-berlin.de>]

Most of the files in base contain so called "keywords" such as
$Revision-Id$ inside comments. In released tar balls these are expanded
to a text like "Revision-Id:
anj@aps.anl.gov-20101005192737-disfz3vs0f3fiixd".

What is the rationale behind using these keywords? Ideally I would like
to get rid of them completely, see below for a rationale. Failing that,
is there a tool which reverts the expansion back to the raw keywords, so
that what I see is comparable to what I get with bzr branch?

My general gripe with these "keywords" is that they make comparisons
between different versions unnecessarily difficult especially if one of
them originates from a released tar ball, in which case the keywords
have been expanded (however this is done, apparently not using bzr since
the bzr-keywords plugin is completely broken) and I get thousands of
completely irrelevant differences which makes it quite hard to spot the
few relevant ones. This is especially important for users who import
base into a local repo (we use darcs) to track site specific changes
(fixes, configuration, experimental changes). The usual way to do this
cleanly is to create a vendor branch on which tar balls are imported,
plus the occasional upstream patch.

Cheers
Ben
-- 
"Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." ― Scott Adams

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