How do you achieve a numeric versioning scheme with Git?

Question

My organization is considering moving from SVN to Git. One argument against moving is as follows:

How do we do versioning?

We have an SDK distribution based on the NetBeans Platform. As the SVN revisions are simple numbers we can use them to extend the version numbers of our plugins and SDK builds. How do we handle this when we move to Git?

Possible solutions:

• Using the build number from Hudson (Problem: you have to check Hudson to correlate that to an actual Git version)
• Manually upping the version for nightly and stable (Problem: Learning curve, human error)

If someone else has encountered a similar problem and solved it, we'd love to hear how.