Re: git behaviour question regarding SHA-1 and commits

[Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 9:04 PM, vinassa vinassa
<vinassa.vinassa@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I found some mention of this in the archive, more about SHA-1 security
> implications, that were dismissed, but here I am looking at just a
> random, very unfortunate case, and just wondering if in this case I
> would end up in a FUBAR situation.

I do not see how such an event would be very unfortunate considering
that it would make you instantaneously famous, so you could write a
lot of articles about what happened and make a fortunate of it... but
if we consider a _far_ much more likely event like some object from
the sky falling directly on your head at the moment when you are doing
a commit, that I would be really very unfortunate... So, maybe, you
should rent space in a bunker first just to work safely...

Seriously, it is so ridiculous to worry so much about so improbable
event, while in practice a lot of repository corruptions comes from
unreliable DRAM, disk storage, or some other reasons. The mean time
between failures for high quality components is only a few hundred
years while doing a commit every second will take dozen million
times more than the age of our universe to generate a collision. So,
those probabilities are so different that there is nothing in our
every day experiences that has the same scale difference. It is like
a hair width and the distance to the closest star.


Dmitry