I can only imagine what a discussion between two developers might be:

  • Which version do you have?
  • a87d31cc7f570a1ac03abc2c04b04f71e4f6c955
  • Ah, I'm at 4bbfcbff7e90fab42bef39e01003113dc715a3b0. You should update. Or maybe I should...

Of course, this only concerns developers. And contributors. And anyone interested in the internals, which might mean quite a lot of people for a framework.

What's worse, however, is when developers stick to old habits. It is common for FOSS projects to name their versions by appending a revision number like, for example, CakePHP 1.2.4.8284. While this is of very little use for most people, it doesn't hurt. It gets really retarded when, switching to Git, the team starts releasing official files like cakephp-cakephp1x-5dd6e55.tar.gz and cakephp-cakephp1x-ef18ab2.tar.gz. WTF. How is even the most advanced user supposed to know which one is the latest? Of course, he should have renamed the file when downloading it but it would have made so much more sense to make the filenames meaningful...

/rant