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> Le 4 nov. 2025 à 19:02, Julia Evans <julia@jvns.ca> a écrit :
>
>
>
>> On Tue, Nov 4, 2025, at 6:45 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> "Julia Evans" <julia@jvns.ca> writes:
>>> I do not see the point of implying that the commit ID is not "special", or that
>>> it's only one of many ways to find a commit because to me it seems very special,
>>> since there is no way I know of to retrieve a commit that doesn't ultimately
>>> end up using the commit ID at some point. (though that ID might not be encoded
>>> in hexadecimal)
>> That is not what I am trying to say. The hexadecimal name is the
>> most neutral way to refer to a commit object, and in that sense it
>> is special. It is the way ref subsystem uses to record the name of
>> objects, and that makes it special enough.
>> But that does not mean that the name _is_ the object. The
>> hexadecimal name is a way you use to name the object, but is not the
>> object itself, and the special-ness of that name does not change it.
>
> Okay. I still do not understand at all why this is so important to you
> (for the reasons I mentioned before) but I'll see if there's anything I can do.
Perhaps one way to look at is, what diagram would I draw given different textual explanations?
The diagram we _want_ folks to draw (?) is the one where a branch points at a commit [a circle, perhaps], which points to a tree [triangle] and recursively blobs [squares], like I’ve seen Stolee draw for GitHub blogs.
We might also want folks to label the arrows with names, or not.
One way to interpret the “branch refers to a commit ID” might be to draw a diagram where the branch points to an ID label, and to find the circle you have to separately consult a different part of the diagram.
Both seem useful to me, though as the former has fewer moving pieces might be better for the model this document describes? I dunno.
Ben Knoble <ben.knoble@gmail.com>