Re: [RFC PATCH 00/18] Multi-pack index (MIDX)

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: Jan 9, 2018, 19:51 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGZ79kYdgD2h7QjjJe0aA4eMATCGkH62XYvziUNvAPsBJDXOCA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <nycvar.QRO.7.76.6.1801091357560.37@ZVAVAG-6OXH6DA.rhebcr.pbec.zvpebfbsg.pbz>

On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 5:05 AM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Show 59 quoted lines

> Hi Peff,
>
> On Tue, 9 Jan 2018, Jeff King wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jan 08, 2018 at 02:43:00PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>>
>> > Take the interactive rebase for example. It generates todo lists with
>> > abbreviated commit names, for readability (and it is *really* important to
>> > keep this readable). As we expect new objects to be introduced by the
>> > interactive rebase, we convert that todo list to unabbreviated commit
>> > names before executing the interactive rebase.
>> >
>> > Your idea (to not care about unambiguous abbreviations) would break that.
>>
>> I think that could be easily worked around for rebase by asking git to
>> check ambiguity during the conversion.
>
> Sure.
>
> It also points to a flaw in your reasoning, and you should take my example
> further: previously, we guaranteed unique abbreviations, and who is to say
> that there is no script out there relying on that guarantee? You?
>
>> But I agree it's a potential problem for other scripts that we might not
>> have control over. I hadn't really intended this to be the default
>> behavior (my patch was just trying to show the direction). But it does
>> make for a pretty awful interface if callers have to opt into it
>> manually ("git log --oneline --no-really-go-fast").
>
> Exactly.
>
>> I am a bit curious if there's a bounded probability that people would
>> find acceptable for Git to give an ambiguous abbreviation. We already
>> accept 1 in 2^160, of course. But would, e.g., one in a million be OK?
>
> What is that going to solve?
>
> I think a better alternative would be to introduce a new abbreviation mode
> that is *intended* to stop caring about unique abbreviations.
>
> In web interfaces, for example, it makes tons of sense to show, say, 8
> digits in link texts and have the full name in the actual link URL.
>
> Currently, we have no way to tell Git: look, I want to have a short label
> for this, but I do not really care that this is unambiguous, I just want
> something to talk about.
>
> (And you are correct, of course, that the uniqueness of abbreviations will
> no longer be guaranteed for partial clones, and it is already not
> guaranteed for shallow clones, and it will only be possible to guarantee
> this, ever, for one particular repository at a particular time.)
>
> I am just hesitant to change things that would break existing setups.
>
> Just to throw this out there: --abbrev=8! would be one possible convention
> to state "I want exactly 8 hex digits, don't bother checking for
> uniqueness".
>
> Not sure how urgent such a feature is.

You seem to have spent some time on rebase, including lamenting on the in-expressiveness of the instruction sheet (c.f. "rebase a mergy history sucks")

And in that light, I'd like to propose a new naming scheme:

(a) assume that we "tag" HEAD at the start of the rebase (b) any abbreviation must be given as committish anchored to said ref:

pick REBASE_HEAD~1 commit subject pick REBASE_HEAD~2 distak the gostim pick REBASE_HEAD~3 Document foo pick REBASE_HEAD~4 Testing the star-gazer

And as we have the full descriptiveness of the committishs there, each commit can be described in a unique way using the graph relationship. I am just throwing the name REBASE_HEAD out there to trigger some associations ("similar to FETCH_HEAD"), but I dislike the name.

(c) this would not solve the problem of mergy history, yet. For that we'd need
    to introduce more keywords, that allow us to move around in the DAG,
    such that we can reset to a specific revision or name revisions on the fly.
    So maybe all we need is "reset", "name" (== short lived tag),
    "merge" (rewrite parents of HEAD) to be expressive enough, but still keep
    the line oriented interface?

Stefan