Re: Distribution of longest common hash prefixes

> On Tue, 3 Apr 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:
>> 
>> > Yeah, the short SHA1 form is obviously always going to be risky. But in 
>> > practice, since people almost always use it just for commits, it's 
>> > probably good enough in practice, and even if you get a collision in 8 
>> > nibbles, most of the time it will probably be trivial to figure out which 
>> > one was meant, so it's not like it's a disaster if somebody ends up 
>> > reporting a bug with a non-unique abbreviation.
>> 
>> Are you hinting to update sha1_name.c::get_sha1() so that we do
>> not accept abbreviated non-commit object names?
>
> NO, I hope not.
>
> Instead (and if the concern is real) we should error out when the 
> abbreviated name is ambigous and impose no restriction otherwise.