diff en/ch00-preface.xml @ 683:c838b3975bc6

Add IDs to paragraphs.

--- a/en/ch00-preface.xml	Thu Mar 19 20:54:12 2009 -0700
+++ b/en/ch00-preface.xml	Thu Mar 19 21:18:52 2009 -0700
@@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
   <sect1>
     <title>Why revision control? Why Mercurial?</title>
 
-    <para>Revision control is the process of managing multiple
+    <para id="x_6d">Revision control is the process of managing multiple
       versions of a piece of information.  In its simplest form, this
       is something that many people do by hand: every time you modify
       a file, save it under a new name that contains a number, each
       one higher than the number of the preceding version.</para>
 
-    <para>Manually managing multiple versions of even a single file is
+    <para id="x_6e">Manually managing multiple versions of even a single file is
       an error-prone task, though, so software tools to help automate
       this process have long been available.  The earliest automated
       revision control tools were intended to help a single user to
@@ -23,11 +23,11 @@
       problem coping with thousands of people working together on
       projects that consist of hundreds of thousands of files.</para>
 
-    <para>The arrival of distributed revision control is relatively
+    <para id="x_6f">The arrival of distributed revision control is relatively
       recent, and so far this new field has grown due to people's
       willingness to explore ill-charted territory.</para>
 
-    <para>I am writing a book about distributed revision control
+    <para id="x_70">I am writing a book about distributed revision control
       because I believe that it is an important subject that deserves
       a field guide. I chose to write about Mercurial because it is
       the easiest tool to learn the terrain with, and yet it scales to
@@ -37,41 +37,41 @@
     <sect2>
       <title>Why use revision control?</title>
 
-      <para>There are a number of reasons why you or your team might
+      <para id="x_71">There are a number of reasons why you or your team might
 	want to use an automated revision control tool for a
 	project.</para>
 
       <itemizedlist>
-	<listitem><para>It will track the history and evolution of
+	<listitem><para id="x_72">It will track the history and evolution of
 	    your project, so you don't have to.  For every change,
 	    you'll have a log of <emphasis>who</emphasis> made it;
 	    <emphasis>why</emphasis> they made it;
 	    <emphasis>when</emphasis> they made it; and
 	    <emphasis>what</emphasis> the change
 	    was.</para></listitem>
-	<listitem><para>When you're working with other people,
+	<listitem><para id="x_73">When you're working with other people,
 	    revision control software makes it easier for you to
 	    collaborate.  For example, when people more or less
 	    simultaneously make potentially incompatible changes, the
 	    software will help you to identify and resolve those
 	    conflicts.</para></listitem>
-	<listitem><para>It can help you to recover from mistakes.  If
+	<listitem><para id="x_74">It can help you to recover from mistakes.  If
 	    you make a change that later turns out to be in error, you
 	    can revert to an earlier version of one or more files.  In
 	    fact, a <emphasis>really</emphasis> good revision control
 	    tool will even help you to efficiently figure out exactly
 	    when a problem was introduced (see section <xref
 	      linkend="sec:undo:bisect"/> for details).</para></listitem>
-	<listitem><para>It will help you to work simultaneously on,
+	<listitem><para id="x_75">It will help you to work simultaneously on,
 	    and manage the drift between, multiple versions of your
 	    project.</para></listitem>
       </itemizedlist>
 
-      <para>Most of these reasons are equally valid---at least in
+      <para id="x_76">Most of these reasons are equally valid---at least in
 	theory---whether you're working on a project by yourself, or
 	with a hundred other people.</para>
 
-      <para>A key question about the practicality of revision control
+      <para id="x_77">A key question about the practicality of revision control
 	at these two different scales (<quote>lone hacker</quote> and
 	<quote>huge team</quote>) is how its
 	<emphasis>benefits</emphasis> compare to its
@@ -79,19 +79,19 @@
 	difficult to understand or use is going to impose a high
 	cost.</para>
 
-      <para>A five-hundred-person project is likely to collapse under
+      <para id="x_78">A five-hundred-person project is likely to collapse under
 	its own weight almost immediately without a revision control
 	tool and process. In this case, the cost of using revision
 	control might hardly seem worth considering, since
 	<emphasis>without</emphasis> it, failure is almost
 	guaranteed.</para>
 
-      <para>On the other hand, a one-person <quote>quick hack</quote>
+      <para id="x_79">On the other hand, a one-person <quote>quick hack</quote>
 	might seem like a poor place to use a revision control tool,
 	because surely the cost of using one must be close to the
 	overall cost of the project.  Right?</para>
 
-      <para>Mercurial uniquely supports <emphasis>both</emphasis> of
+      <para id="x_7a">Mercurial uniquely supports <emphasis>both</emphasis> of
 	these scales of development.  You can learn the basics in just
 	a few minutes, and due to its low overhead, you can apply
 	revision control to the smallest of projects with ease.  Its
@@ -101,7 +101,7 @@
 	time, Mercurial's high performance and peer-to-peer nature let
 	you scale painlessly to handle large projects.</para>
 
-      <para>No revision control tool can rescue a poorly run project,
+      <para id="x_7b">No revision control tool can rescue a poorly run project,
 	but a good choice of tools can make a huge difference to the
 	fluidity with which you can work on a project.</para>
 
@@ -110,19 +110,19 @@
     <sect2>
       <title>The many names of revision control</title>
 
-      <para>Revision control is a diverse field, so much so that it is
+      <para id="x_7c">Revision control is a diverse field, so much so that it is
 	referred to by many names and acronyms.  Here are a few of the
 	more common variations you'll encounter:</para>
       <itemizedlist>
-	<listitem><para>Revision control (RCS)</para></listitem>
-	<listitem><para>Software configuration management (SCM), or
+	<listitem><para id="x_7d">Revision control (RCS)</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para id="x_7e">Software configuration management (SCM), or
 	    configuration management</para></listitem>
-	<listitem><para>Source code management</para></listitem>
-	<listitem><para>Source code control, or source
+	<listitem><para id="x_7f">Source code management</para></listitem>
+	<listitem><para id="x_80">Source code control, or source
 	    control</para></listitem>
-	<listitem><para>Version control
+	<listitem><para id="x_81">Version control
 	    (VCS)</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
-      <para>Some people claim that these terms actually have different
+      <para id="x_82">Some people claim that these terms actually have different
 	meanings, but in practice they overlap so much that there's no
 	agreed or even useful way to tease them apart.</para>
 
@@ -132,7 +132,7 @@
   <sect1>
     <title>This book is a work in progress</title>
 
-    <para>I am releasing this book while I am still writing it, in the
+    <para id="x_83">I am releasing this book while I am still writing it, in the
       hope that it will prove useful to others.  I am writing under an
       open license in the hope that you, my readers, will contribute
       feedback and perhaps content of your own.</para>
@@ -141,21 +141,21 @@
   <sect1>
     <title>About the examples in this book</title>
 
-    <para>This book takes an unusual approach to code samples.  Every
+    <para id="x_84">This book takes an unusual approach to code samples.  Every
       example is <quote>live</quote>---each one is actually the result
       of a shell script that executes the Mercurial commands you see.
       Every time an image of the book is built from its sources, all
       the example scripts are automatically run, and their current
       results compared against their expected results.</para>
 
-    <para>The advantage of this approach is that the examples are
+    <para id="x_85">The advantage of this approach is that the examples are
       always accurate; they describe <emphasis>exactly</emphasis> the
       behaviour of the version of Mercurial that's mentioned at the
       front of the book.  If I update the version of Mercurial that
       I'm documenting, and the output of some command changes, the
       build fails.</para>
 
-    <para>There is a small disadvantage to this approach, which is
+    <para id="x_86">There is a small disadvantage to this approach, which is
       that the dates and times you'll see in examples tend to be
       <quote>squashed</quote> together in a way that they wouldn't be
       if the same commands were being typed by a human.  Where a human
@@ -163,13 +163,13 @@
       resulting timestamps correspondingly spread out, my automated
       example scripts run many commands in one second.</para>
 
-    <para>As an instance of this, several consecutive commits in an
+    <para id="x_87">As an instance of this, several consecutive commits in an
       example can show up as having occurred during the same second.
       You can see this occur in the <literal
 	role="hg-ext">bisect</literal> example in section <xref
 	id="sec:undo:bisect"/>, for instance.</para>
 
-    <para>So when you're reading examples, don't place too much weight
+    <para id="x_88">So when you're reading examples, don't place too much weight
       on the dates or times you see in the output of commands.  But
       <emphasis>do</emphasis> be confident that the behaviour you're
       seeing is consistent and reproducible.</para>
@@ -179,18 +179,18 @@
   <sect1>
     <title>Trends in the field</title>
 
-    <para>There has been an unmistakable trend in the development and
+    <para id="x_89">There has been an unmistakable trend in the development and
       use of revision control tools over the past four decades, as
       people have become familiar with the capabilities of their tools
       and constrained by their limitations.</para>
 
-    <para>The first generation began by managing single files on
+    <para id="x_8a">The first generation began by managing single files on
       individual computers.  Although these tools represented a huge
       advance over ad-hoc manual revision control, their locking model
       and reliance on a single computer limited them to small,
       tightly-knit teams.</para>
 
-    <para>The second generation loosened these constraints by moving
+    <para id="x_8b">The second generation loosened these constraints by moving
       to network-centered architectures, and managing entire projects
       at a time.  As projects grew larger, they ran into new problems.
       With clients needing to talk to servers very frequently, server
@@ -202,7 +202,7 @@
       tools to interact with a project in a natural way, as they could
       not record their changes.</para>
 
-    <para>The current generation of revision control tools is
+    <para id="x_8c">The current generation of revision control tools is
       peer-to-peer in nature.  All of these systems have dropped the
       dependency on a single central server, and allow people to
       distribute their revision control data to where it's actually
@@ -217,14 +217,14 @@
     <title>A few of the advantages of distributed revision
       control</title>
 
-    <para>Even though distributed revision control tools have for
+    <para id="x_8d">Even though distributed revision control tools have for
       several years been as robust and usable as their
       previous-generation counterparts, people using older tools have
       not yet necessarily woken up to their advantages.  There are a
       number of ways in which distributed tools shine relative to
       centralised ones.</para>
 
-    <para>For an individual developer, distributed tools are almost
+    <para id="x_8e">For an individual developer, distributed tools are almost
       always much faster than centralised tools.  This is for a simple
       reason: a centralised tool needs to talk over the network for
       many common operations, because most metadata is stored in a
@@ -235,7 +235,7 @@
       going to spend a lot of time interacting with your revision
       control software.</para>
 
-    <para>Distributed tools are indifferent to the vagaries of your
+    <para id="x_8f">Distributed tools are indifferent to the vagaries of your
       server infrastructure, again because they replicate metadata to
       so many locations.  If you use a centralised system and your
       server catches fire, you'd better hope that your backup media
@@ -243,7 +243,7 @@
       worked.  With a distributed tool, you have many backups
       available on every contributor's computer.</para>
 
-    <para>The reliability of your network will affect distributed
+    <para id="x_90">The reliability of your network will affect distributed
       tools far less than it will centralised tools.  You can't even
       use a centralised tool without a network connection, except for
       a few highly constrained commands.  With a distributed tool, if
@@ -256,7 +256,7 @@
     <sect2>
       <title>Advantages for open source projects</title>
 
-      <para>If you take a shine to an open source project and decide
+      <para id="x_91">If you take a shine to an open source project and decide
 	that you would like to start hacking on it, and that project
 	uses a distributed revision control tool, you are at once a
 	peer with the people who consider themselves the
@@ -274,7 +274,7 @@
       <sect3>
 	<title>The forking non-problem</title>
 
-	<para>It has been suggested that distributed revision control
+	<para id="x_92">It has been suggested that distributed revision control
 	  tools pose some sort of risk to open source projects because
 	  they make it easy to <quote>fork</quote> the development of
 	  a project.  A fork happens when there are differences in
@@ -284,7 +284,7 @@
 	  project's source code, and goes off in its own
 	  direction.</para>
 
-	<para>Sometimes the camps in a fork decide to reconcile their
+	<para id="x_93">Sometimes the camps in a fork decide to reconcile their
 	  differences. With a centralised revision control system, the
 	  <emphasis>technical</emphasis> process of reconciliation is
 	  painful, and has to be performed largely by hand.  You have
@@ -293,7 +293,7 @@
 	  the tree somehow. This usually loses some or all of one
 	  side's revision history.</para>
 
-	<para>What distributed tools do with respect to forking is
+	<para id="x_94">What distributed tools do with respect to forking is
 	  they make forking the <emphasis>only</emphasis> way to
 	  develop a project.  Every single change that you make is
 	  potentially a fork point.  The great strength of this
@@ -302,23 +302,23 @@
 	  because forks are absolutely fundamental: they happen all
 	  the time.</para>
 
-	<para>If every piece of work that everybody does, all the
+	<para id="x_95">If every piece of work that everybody does, all the
 	  time, is framed in terms of forking and merging, then what
 	  the open source world refers to as a <quote>fork</quote>
 	  becomes <emphasis>purely</emphasis> a social issue.  If
 	  anything, distributed tools <emphasis>lower</emphasis> the
 	  likelihood of a fork:</para>
 	<itemizedlist>
-	  <listitem><para>They eliminate the social distinction that
+	  <listitem><para id="x_96">They eliminate the social distinction that
 	      centralised tools impose: that between insiders (people
 	      with commit access) and outsiders (people
 	      without).</para></listitem>
-	  <listitem><para>They make it easier to reconcile after a
+	  <listitem><para id="x_97">They make it easier to reconcile after a
 	      social fork, because all that's involved from the
 	      perspective of the revision control software is just
 	      another merge.</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
 
-	<para>Some people resist distributed tools because they want
+	<para id="x_98">Some people resist distributed tools because they want
 	  to retain tight control over their projects, and they
 	  believe that centralised tools give them this control.
 	  However, if you're of this belief, and you publish your CVS
@@ -335,7 +335,7 @@
     <sect2>
       <title>Advantages for commercial projects</title>
 
-      <para>Many commercial projects are undertaken by teams that are
+      <para id="x_99">Many commercial projects are undertaken by teams that are
 	scattered across the globe.  Contributors who are far from a
 	central server will see slower command execution and perhaps
 	less reliability.  Commercial revision control systems attempt
@@ -347,7 +347,7 @@
 	there's no redundant communication between repositories over
 	expensive long-haul network links.</para>
 
-      <para>Centralised revision control systems tend to have
+      <para id="x_9a">Centralised revision control systems tend to have
 	relatively low scalability.  It's not unusual for an expensive
 	centralised system to fall over under the combined load of
 	just a few dozen concurrent users.  Once again, the typical
@@ -359,7 +359,7 @@
 	replication to balance load becomes a simple matter of
 	scripting.</para>
 
-      <para>If you have an employee in the field, troubleshooting a
+      <para id="x_9b">If you have an employee in the field, troubleshooting a
 	problem at a customer's site, they'll benefit from distributed
 	revision control. The tool will let them generate custom
 	builds, try different fixes in isolation from each other, and
@@ -372,35 +372,35 @@
   <sect1>
     <title>Why choose Mercurial?</title>
 
-    <para>Mercurial has a unique set of properties that make it a
+    <para id="x_9c">Mercurial has a unique set of properties that make it a
       particularly good choice as a revision control system.</para>
     <itemizedlist>
-      <listitem><para>It is easy to learn and use.</para></listitem>
-      <listitem><para>It is lightweight.</para></listitem>
-      <listitem><para>It scales excellently.</para></listitem>
-      <listitem><para>It is easy to
+      <listitem><para id="x_9d">It is easy to learn and use.</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_9e">It is lightweight.</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_9f">It scales excellently.</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_a0">It is easy to
 	  customise.</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
 
-    <para>If you are at all familiar with revision control systems,
+    <para id="x_a1">If you are at all familiar with revision control systems,
       you should be able to get up and running with Mercurial in less
       than five minutes.  Even if not, it will take no more than a few
       minutes longer.  Mercurial's command and feature sets are
       generally uniform and consistent, so you can keep track of a few
       general rules instead of a host of exceptions.</para>
 
-    <para>On a small project, you can start working with Mercurial in
+    <para id="x_a2">On a small project, you can start working with Mercurial in
       moments. Creating new changes and branches; transferring changes
       around (whether locally or over a network); and history and
       status operations are all fast.  Mercurial attempts to stay
       nimble and largely out of your way by combining low cognitive
       overhead with blazingly fast operations.</para>
 
-    <para>The usefulness of Mercurial is not limited to small
+    <para id="x_a3">The usefulness of Mercurial is not limited to small
       projects: it is used by projects with hundreds to thousands of
       contributors, each containing tens of thousands of files and
       hundreds of megabytes of source code.</para>
 
-    <para>If the core functionality of Mercurial is not enough for
+    <para id="x_a4">If the core functionality of Mercurial is not enough for
       you, it's easy to build on.  Mercurial is well suited to
       scripting tasks, and its clean internals and implementation in
       Python make it easy to add features in the form of extensions.
@@ -412,7 +412,7 @@
   <sect1>
     <title>Mercurial compared with other tools</title>
 
-    <para>Before you read on, please understand that this section
+    <para id="x_a5">Before you read on, please understand that this section
       necessarily reflects my own experiences, interests, and (dare I
       say it) biases.  I have used every one of the revision control
       tools listed below, in most cases for several years at a
@@ -422,22 +422,22 @@
     <sect2>
       <title>Subversion</title>
 
-      <para>Subversion is a popular revision control tool, developed
+      <para id="x_a6">Subversion is a popular revision control tool, developed
 	to replace CVS.  It has a centralised client/server
 	architecture.</para>
 
-      <para>Subversion and Mercurial have similarly named commands for
+      <para id="x_a7">Subversion and Mercurial have similarly named commands for
 	performing the same operations, so if you're familiar with
 	one, it is easy to learn to use the other.  Both tools are
 	portable to all popular operating systems.</para>
 
-      <para>Prior to version 1.5, Subversion had no useful support for
+      <para id="x_a8">Prior to version 1.5, Subversion had no useful support for
 	merges. At the time of writing, its merge tracking capability
 	is new, and known to be <ulink
 	  url="http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.branchmerge.advanced.html#svn.branchmerge.advanced.finalword">complicated 
 	  and buggy</ulink>.</para>
 
-      <para>Mercurial has a substantial performance advantage over
+      <para id="x_a9">Mercurial has a substantial performance advantage over
 	Subversion on every revision control operation I have
 	benchmarked.  I have measured its advantage as ranging from a
 	factor of two to a factor of six when compared with Subversion
@@ -450,7 +450,7 @@
 	and network bandwidth become bottlenecks for modestly large
 	projects.</para>
 
-      <para>Additionally, Subversion incurs substantial storage
+      <para id="x_aa">Additionally, Subversion incurs substantial storage
 	overhead to avoid network transactions for a few common
 	operations, such as finding modified files
 	(<literal>status</literal>) and displaying modifications
@@ -460,13 +460,13 @@
 	even though the Mercurial repository contains a complete
 	history of the project.</para>
 
-      <para>Subversion is widely supported by third party tools.
+      <para id="x_ab">Subversion is widely supported by third party tools.
 	Mercurial currently lags considerably in this area.  This gap
 	is closing, however, and indeed some of Mercurial's GUI tools
 	now outshine their Subversion equivalents.  Like Mercurial,
 	Subversion has an excellent user manual.</para>
 
-      <para>Because Subversion doesn't store revision history on the
+      <para id="x_ac">Because Subversion doesn't store revision history on the
 	client, it is well suited to managing projects that deal with
 	lots of large, opaque binary files.  If you check in fifty
 	revisions to an incompressible 10MB file, Subversion's
@@ -475,14 +475,14 @@
 	of revisions, because the differences between each revision
 	are large.</para>
 
-      <para>In addition, it's often difficult or, more usually,
+      <para id="x_ad">In addition, it's often difficult or, more usually,
 	impossible to merge different versions of a binary file.
 	Subversion's ability to let a user lock a file, so that they
 	temporarily have the exclusive right to commit changes to it,
 	can be a significant advantage to a project where binary files
 	are widely used.</para>
 
-      <para>Mercurial can import revision history from a Subversion
+      <para id="x_ae">Mercurial can import revision history from a Subversion
 	repository. It can also export revision history to a
 	Subversion repository.  This makes it easy to <quote>test the
 	  waters</quote> and use Mercurial and Subversion in parallel
@@ -496,24 +496,24 @@
     <sect2>
       <title>Git</title>
 
-      <para>Git is a distributed revision control tool that was
+      <para id="x_af">Git is a distributed revision control tool that was
 	developed for managing the Linux kernel source tree.  Like
 	Mercurial, its early design was somewhat influenced by
 	Monotone.</para>
 
-      <para>Git has a very large command set, with version 1.5.0
+      <para id="x_b0">Git has a very large command set, with version 1.5.0
 	providing 139 individual commands.  It has something of a
 	reputation for being difficult to learn.  Compared to Git,
 	Mercurial has a strong focus on simplicity.</para>
 
-      <para>In terms of performance, Git is extremely fast.  In
+      <para id="x_b1">In terms of performance, Git is extremely fast.  In
 	several cases, it is faster than Mercurial, at least on Linux,
 	while Mercurial performs better on other operations.  However,
 	on Windows, the performance and general level of support that
 	Git provides is, at the time of writing, far behind that of
 	Mercurial.</para>
 
-      <para>While a Mercurial repository needs no maintenance, a Git
+      <para id="x_b2">While a Mercurial repository needs no maintenance, a Git
 	repository requires frequent manual <quote>repacks</quote> of
 	its metadata.  Without these, performance degrades, while
 	space usage grows rapidly.  A server that contains many Git
@@ -524,13 +524,13 @@
 	slightly smaller than a Mercurial repository, but an unpacked
 	repository is several orders of magnitude larger.</para>
 
-      <para>The core of Git is written in C.  Many Git commands are
+      <para id="x_b3">The core of Git is written in C.  Many Git commands are
 	implemented as shell or Perl scripts, and the quality of these
 	scripts varies widely. I have encountered several instances
 	where scripts charged along blindly in the presence of errors
 	that should have been fatal.</para>
 
-      <para>Mercurial can import revision history from a Git
+      <para id="x_b4">Mercurial can import revision history from a Git
 	repository.</para>
 
 
@@ -538,11 +538,11 @@
     <sect2>
       <title>CVS</title>
 
-      <para>CVS is probably the most widely used revision control tool
+      <para id="x_b5">CVS is probably the most widely used revision control tool
 	in the world.  Due to its age and internal untidiness, it has
 	been only lightly maintained for many years.</para>
 
-      <para>It has a centralised client/server architecture.  It does
+      <para id="x_b6">It has a centralised client/server architecture.  It does
 	not group related file changes into atomic commits, making it
 	easy for people to <quote>break the build</quote>: one person
 	can successfully commit part of a change and then be blocked
@@ -554,7 +554,7 @@
 	the changes made to each file involved (if you even know what
 	those files were).</para>
 
-      <para>CVS has a muddled notion of tags and branches that I will
+      <para id="x_b7">CVS has a muddled notion of tags and branches that I will
 	not attempt to even describe.  It does not support renaming of
 	files or directories well, making it easy to corrupt a
 	repository.  It has almost no internal consistency checking
@@ -562,7 +562,7 @@
 	whether or how a repository is corrupt.  I would not recommend
 	CVS for any project, existing or new.</para>
 
-      <para>Mercurial can import CVS revision history.  However, there
+      <para id="x_b8">Mercurial can import CVS revision history.  However, there
 	are a few caveats that apply; these are true of every other
 	revision control tool's CVS importer, too.  Due to CVS's lack
 	of atomic changes and unversioned filesystem hierarchy, it is
@@ -576,7 +576,7 @@
 	the less interesting problems I can recall from personal
 	experience).</para>
 
-      <para>Mercurial can import revision history from a CVS
+      <para id="x_b9">Mercurial can import revision history from a CVS
 	repository.</para>
 
 
@@ -584,13 +584,13 @@
     <sect2>
       <title>Commercial tools</title>
 
-      <para>Perforce has a centralised client/server architecture,
+      <para id="x_ba">Perforce has a centralised client/server architecture,
 	with no client-side caching of any data.  Unlike modern
 	revision control tools, Perforce requires that a user run a
 	command to inform the server about every file they intend to
 	edit.</para>
 
-      <para>The performance of Perforce is quite good for small teams,
+      <para id="x_bb">The performance of Perforce is quite good for small teams,
 	but it falls off rapidly as the number of users grows beyond a
 	few dozen. Modestly large Perforce installations require the
 	deployment of proxies to cope with the load their users
@@ -601,16 +601,16 @@
     <sect2>
       <title>Choosing a revision control tool</title>
 
-      <para>With the exception of CVS, all of the tools listed above
+      <para id="x_bc">With the exception of CVS, all of the tools listed above
 	have unique strengths that suit them to particular styles of
 	work.  There is no single revision control tool that is best
 	in all situations.</para>
 
-      <para>As an example, Subversion is a good choice for working
+      <para id="x_bd">As an example, Subversion is a good choice for working
 	with frequently edited binary files, due to its centralised
 	nature and support for file locking.</para>
 
-      <para>I personally find Mercurial's properties of simplicity,
+      <para id="x_be">I personally find Mercurial's properties of simplicity,
 	performance, and good merge support to be a compelling
 	combination that has served me well for several years.</para>
 
@@ -620,7 +620,7 @@
   <sect1>
     <title>Switching from another tool to Mercurial</title>
 
-    <para>Mercurial is bundled with an extension named <literal
+    <para id="x_bf">Mercurial is bundled with an extension named <literal
 	role="hg-ext">convert</literal>, which can incrementally
       import revision history from several other revision control
       tools.  By <quote>incremental</quote>, I mean that you can
@@ -628,21 +628,21 @@
       the conversion later to obtain new changes that happened after
       the initial conversion.</para>
 
-    <para>The revision control tools supported by <literal
+    <para id="x_c0">The revision control tools supported by <literal
 	role="hg-ext">convert</literal> are as follows:</para>
     <itemizedlist>
-      <listitem><para>Subversion</para></listitem>
-      <listitem><para>CVS</para></listitem>
-      <listitem><para>Git</para></listitem>
-      <listitem><para>Darcs</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
+      <listitem><para id="x_c1">Subversion</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_c2">CVS</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_c3">Git</para></listitem>
+      <listitem><para id="x_c4">Darcs</para></listitem></itemizedlist>
 
-    <para>In addition, <literal role="hg-ext">convert</literal> can
+    <para id="x_c5">In addition, <literal role="hg-ext">convert</literal> can
       export changes from Mercurial to Subversion.  This makes it
       possible to try Subversion and Mercurial in parallel before
       committing to a switchover, without risking the loss of any
       work.</para>
 
-    <para>The <command role="hg-ext-convert">convert</command> command
+    <para id="x_c6">The <command role="hg-ext-convert">convert</command> command
       is easy to use.  Simply point it at the path or URL of the
       source repository, optionally give it the name of the
       destination repository, and it will start working.  After the
@@ -653,7 +653,7 @@
   <sect1>
     <title>A short history of revision control</title>
 
-    <para>The best known of the old-time revision control tools is
+    <para id="x_c7">The best known of the old-time revision control tools is
       SCCS (Source Code Control System), which Marc Rochkind wrote at
       Bell Labs, in the early 1970s.  SCCS operated on individual
       files, and required every person working on a project to have
@@ -664,13 +664,13 @@
       modifying those files without the help of an
       administrator.</para>
 
-    <para>Walter Tichy developed a free alternative to SCCS in the
+    <para id="x_c8">Walter Tichy developed a free alternative to SCCS in the
       early 1980s; he called his program RCS (Revision Control System).
       Like SCCS, RCS required developers to work in a single shared
       workspace, and to lock files to prevent multiple people from
       modifying them simultaneously.</para>
 
-    <para>Later in the 1980s, Dick Grune used RCS as a building block
+    <para id="x_c9">Later in the 1980s, Dick Grune used RCS as a building block
       for a set of shell scripts he initially called cmt, but then
       renamed to CVS (Concurrent Versions System).  The big innovation
       of CVS was that it let developers work simultaneously and
@@ -681,7 +681,7 @@
       their copies independently.  They had to merge their edits prior
       to committing changes to the central repository.</para>
 
-    <para>Brian Berliner took Grune's original scripts and rewrote
+    <para id="x_ca">Brian Berliner took Grune's original scripts and rewrote
       them in C, releasing in 1989 the code that has since developed
       into the modern version of CVS.  CVS subsequently acquired the
       ability to operate over a network connection, giving it a
@@ -692,14 +692,14 @@
       server is.  CVS has been enormously successful; it is probably
       the world's most widely used revision control system.</para>
 
-    <para>In the early 1990s, Sun Microsystems developed an early
+    <para id="x_cb">In the early 1990s, Sun Microsystems developed an early
       distributed revision control system, called TeamWare.  A
       TeamWare workspace contains a complete copy of the project's
       history.  TeamWare has no notion of a central repository.  (CVS
       relied upon RCS for its history storage; TeamWare used
       SCCS.)</para>
 
-    <para>As the 1990s progressed, awareness grew of a number of
+    <para id="x_cc">As the 1990s progressed, awareness grew of a number of
       problems with CVS.  It records simultaneous changes to multiple
       files individually, instead of grouping them together as a
       single logically atomic operation.  It does not manage its file
@@ -709,7 +709,7 @@
 	level</quote> of fixing these architectural problems
       prohibitive.</para>
 
-    <para>In 2001, Jim Blandy and Karl Fogel, two developers who had
+    <para id="x_cd">In 2001, Jim Blandy and Karl Fogel, two developers who had
       worked on CVS, started a project to replace it with a tool that
       would have a better architecture and cleaner code.  The result,
       Subversion, does not stray from CVS's centralised client/server
@@ -718,7 +718,7 @@
       generally better tool than CVS. Since its initial release, it
       has rapidly grown in popularity.</para>
 
-    <para>More or less simultaneously, Graydon Hoare began working on
+    <para id="x_ce">More or less simultaneously, Graydon Hoare began working on
       an ambitious distributed revision control system that he named
       Monotone. While Monotone addresses many of CVS's design flaws
       and has a peer-to-peer architecture, it goes beyond earlier (and
@@ -727,7 +727,7 @@
       integral notion of <quote>trust</quote> for code from different
       sources.</para>
 
-    <para>Mercurial began life in 2005.  While a few aspects of its
+    <para id="x_cf">Mercurial began life in 2005.  While a few aspects of its
       design are influenced by Monotone, Mercurial focuses on ease of
       use, high performance, and scalability to very large
       projects.</para>
@@ -737,12 +737,12 @@
   <sect1>
     <title>Colophon&emdash;this book is Free</title>
 
-    <para>This book is licensed under the Open Publication License,
+    <para id="x_d0">This book is licensed under the Open Publication License,
       and is produced entirely using Free Software tools.  It is
       typeset with DocBook XML.  Illustrations are drawn and rendered with
       <ulink url="http://www.inkscape.org/">Inkscape</ulink>.</para>
 
-    <para>The complete source code for this book is published as a
+    <para id="x_d1">The complete source code for this book is published as a
       Mercurial repository, at <ulink
 	url="http://hg.serpentine.com/mercurial/book">http://hg.serpentine.com/mercurial/book</ulink>.</para>