Since it's intended as a cross-VCS tool, Eric Raymond’s reposurgeon does not use hashes to refer to commits, but instead uses “action stamps”. From <http://www.catb.org/~esr/reposurgeon/reposurgeon.html#reference-lifting>:
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> An action stamp is an RFC3339 timestamp, followed by a '!', followed > by a committer email address, followed by ':' and a 1-origin sequence > number if the date/time pair is not unique in the repository; it > refers to a commit without being VCS-specific. Thus, instead of > "commit 304a53c2" or "r2355", "2011-10-25T15:11:09Z!fred@foonly.com".
Would there be any interest at all in extending the various Git utilities to understand this style of reference?
—Joel Salomon