Noob Question: Build number

[blr at robertsr.us]

I'm in the process of switching my development teams from CVS to
mercurial.  I have played with mercurial quite a bit, but I admit that
I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it.

To start with, we'll have a central hg server that all developers push
to and pull from via ssh.

One thing we had an ugly kludge for in CVS was a build number.  When a
developer fixes a bug, they 'cvs commit' and a hook on the cvs server
tells them the commit number, and they put that number in the defect
tracker.  Then the testers know any build with that number or higher
should have that defect fixed.

My plan now for mercurial is to have a wrapper around 'hg push' that
does an 'hg outgoing', greps the output for the latest changeset, does
the 'hg push', then does a wget from hgweb to get the incremental
version number for the changeset on the shared server, and display that as
the build number.

That's better than the commit hooks in CVS, but my question is, is
there a better way to do this in mercurial?

Thanks,
Barry Roberts