Re: Referring to revisions in the git future.

[David Kastrup]

Tassilo Horn <address@hidden> writes:

> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>>  > 40 hexadecimal digits are pretty unambiguous on their own.
>>
>> Sure, but I had in mind abbreviations as well.
>
> According to the Regex Dictionary at http://www.visca.com/regexdict/
> there is no single English word matching the regex "^[a-f0-9]{7,}$" and
> AFAICS an abberviated Git SHA is 7 chars wide.

It is at least 6 characters I think, more if 6 would not be unambiguous.
The problem is that "unambiguous" changes over time and repositories.  A
historically unambiguous SHA might become ambiguous over time and/or it
might be unambiguous in one person's repository but not another.  And
when garbage collection removes rebased or deleted branches,
"unambiguous" might even become shorter again.

It's not like anybody's going to want to type off "abbreviations" by
hand anyway: too error-prone.  Just paste the full thing.  Really.  I've
been developing for years with Git, and that's just what everybody does
most of the time.

-- 
David Kastrup