Re: The merge from hell...

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

On Fri, 3 Feb 2006, Brown, Len wrote:

quoted

In the back of my head I was worried about using plain
numbers when I saw somebody refer to "shorthand SHA1".
Hopefully this is an idle worry and it is not possible
for the tool to confuse a numeric branch name with a SHA1 id.

It _is_ possible, but the rule is that references will be resolved first. 

I have to admit that I had this broken for a while.  The
breakage was when you have the same numeric branch name _and_
tagname, then ref resolution was skipped and short SHA1 was
taken.  It _might_ have bitten somebody in real life until I
fixed it.  But I believe this is fixed now.

It's pretty unlikely, of course. But it's one reason to try to avoid using 
ref names that are numeric.

Or even non numeric ones, like "deadbeef".