Re: Distribution of longest common hash prefixes

[Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>]

On Tue, 3 Apr 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:
> 
> > Yeah, the short SHA1 form is obviously always going to be risky. But in 
> > practice, since people almost always use it just for commits, it's 
> > probably good enough in practice, and even if you get a collision in 8 
> > nibbles, most of the time it will probably be trivial to figure out which 
> > one was meant, so it's not like it's a disaster if somebody ends up 
> > reporting a bug with a non-unique abbreviation.
> 
> Are you hinting to update sha1_name.c::get_sha1() so that we do
> not accept abbreviated non-commit object names?

NO, I hope not.

Instead (and if the concern is real) we should error out when the 
abbreviated name is ambigous and impose no restriction otherwise.


Nicolas