Re: Version numbers for VCS snapshots

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 12:17:19PM +0300, Alex Kost wrote:
> Leo Famulari (2016-02-21 07:35 +0300) wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 10:05:36PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> [...]
> >> I prefer 7!  This is how Git usually truncates SHA1s, so it can’t be wrong.
> >
> > I stumbled across this email earlier, which reminded me of this
> > discussion about hash lengths:
> > https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/10/28/287
> >
> > There are currently 13 7-character hash collisions in Guix's git repo:
> >
> > $ git rev-list --objects --all | cut -c1-7 | sort | uniq -dc
> >       2 0d2b24c
> >       2 11e0632
> >       2 1f3ab8d
> >       2 229bd6c
> >       2 7c4a7b7
> >       2 9ff8b63
> >       2 aa27b56
> >       2 c10c562
> >       2 d96cdce
> >       2 dab4329
> >       2 dc27d1c
> >       2 ea119a2
> >       2 f56cc27
> 
> Hm, when I tried "git rev-list --objects --all" I got some ridiculous
> number of lines (I pressed C-c C-c after about 78000 lines).  Does this
> command really do what you wanted?  (I'm sorry I didn't RTFM well enough
> to understand what it does).

It lists the objects in the repository, so not just commits. I'm not
presenting this as evidence that something is wrong with our repo, just
that 7 characters is not enough to unambiguously refer to things in git
repos of projects our size. For example, with `git show`.

It's more of an informational link than a call to action. Although I am
updating all of our uses of git-reference to use the method we agreed
upon upthread, before any of those upstream repos grow too large for the
identifiers we are currently using.

> 
> I'm not sure if the following command is correct to find such
> collisions, but it gives nothing (i.e., no collisions):
> 
>   git log --oneline | cut -c1-7 | sort | uniq -dc

Indeed, we only have about 10000 commits. 6 characters is where we get
collisions in our log.

> 
> -- 
> Alex