Stamps are nice, but git and friends miss something that the VCS of yore would give you - a monotonously increasing number you could stick somewhere in your ver

Stamps are nice, but git and friends miss something that the VCS of yore would give you - a monotonously increasing number you could stick somewhere in your version - and be able to tell at a glance which was newer. 2.4.16-12 vs 2.4.16-35 - obviously -35 is later. But 2.4.16-bcbd1c6 vs 2.4.16-d645104 - which is later? Compile dates won't necessarily help because "earlier" code could have been compiled later. It's forcing the versioning to do something it shouldn't, arguably, but is nice to have something that the user can decipher (even if you still should have the commit).