Hi Joe,

On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 12:00 AM, Joe Perches [off-list ref] wrote:

Commit logs have various forms of commit id references.

Try to standardize on a 12 character long lower case
commit id along with a description of parentheses and
the quoted subject line

ie: commit 0123456789ab ("commit description")

Now this is in mainline, checkpatch starts complaining about my "too long"
(40 chars) commit IDs in commit messages :-(

40 chars may be too long (but it's quick to copy-and-paste, as "git show"
shows that by default), but 12 sounds a bit short, as that's only 48 bits.

According to the Birthday Paradox (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem),
there's a probability of 50% of a collision if you use 48 bits IDs in a
repository with ca. 16 milion (2^24) objects. A Linux kernel repository
counts ca. 4 million objects, so we're getting close...

So soon we'll get "error: short SHA1 is ambiguous".

BTW, is there actually an easy way to make "git show" show all options for
an ambiguous SHA1?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds