Re: [git patches] libata updates, GPG signed (but see admin notes)

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Nov 7, 2011, 16:24 UTC
Message-ID: <CA+55aFyKocxDUD2YhhBhfDzp+WHOddOZ_3mfqwADri86aUOUFQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <22879.1320652337@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>

On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 11:52 PM,  <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> OK.. I'll bite.  How do you disambiguate a '42deadbeef' in the changelog part
> of a commit as being a commit ID, as opposed to being an address in a traceback
> or something similar? Yes, I know you only change the ones that actually map to
> a commit ID, but I'd not be surprised if by now we've got enough commits and
> stack tracebacks in the git history that we'll birthday-paradox ourselves into
> a false-positive in an automatic replacement.

I don't think we are quite there yet. And (sadly) most of the commit ID's in the history are 7 hex characters, because that used to be the default git abbreviation. So there is unlikely to be any real conflicts.

If we do miss one or two, that will be sad and embarrassing, but is not a real problem in practice.

We probably could add various heuristics (the SHA1 values are *often* preceded by the string "commit"), and a really good import would also have somebody at least visually inspecting ones that other heuristics say might be debatable (for example - because they have 8 hex digits and there are other numbers around them that were *not* converted), but in the end perfection is the enemy of good. It's not really worth the headache to worry about *all* the cases, if you can cheaply and simply get 99+% right.

And I think the 99% is almost trivial. While the last 1% may or may not be worth worrying about.

               Linus