If I want to track down build artifacts, usually a monotonically increasing integer is the way to go. Everytime I make a build, it gets bumped and added to the artifact name. Then a new commit is created, plus optionally, a git tag. Now, if I need to reference it, I look back in git and find the commit which contains that integer.
But do I really need it? Is there some other way to reference the exact place in git history?
Well, duh, the commit SHA is right there.
I've been working on a browser extension for the past couple of months and, up until now, I had no build numbers attached to the artifacts. Small changelogs + semantic versioning was good-enough. The artifact I'm shipping to QA is basically a sensible-named zip file (which can be then loaded in a chromium browser, or used by Xcode to build the Safari iOS version).