Re: [REVISED PATCH 2/6] Introduce commit notes

On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 08:28:27PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

And yes, the "search for zero bytes" is not *guaranteed* to find any 
beginning at all, if you have lots of short names, *and* lots of zero 
bytes in the SHA1's. But while short names may be common, zero bytes in 
SHA1's are not so much (since you should expect to see a very even 
distribution of bytes, and as such most SHA1's by far should have no zero 
bytes at all!)

The probability of a sha1 to have a zero is approximatively 0.075.
That's 1 in 13, more or less.

  OG.