Re: git behaviour question regarding SHA-1 and commits

From: Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 13, 2011, 22:14 UTC
Message-ID: <CAHkcothpwYHK7qtmCE-XR8kVKb9bqfbSiWjLPW82SOEhohXR1g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAJuRt+r9BjYcead6hgzdUT0Bisz1D48cegqkoJ0S537VMYBy_g@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 9:04 PM, vinassa vinassa <vinassa.vinassa@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> I found some mention of this in the archive, more about SHA-1 security
> implications, that were dismissed, but here I am looking at just a
> random, very unfortunate case, and just wondering if in this case I
> would end up in a FUBAR situation.

I do not see how such an event would be very unfortunate considering that it would make you instantaneously famous, so you could write a lot of articles about what happened and make a fortunate of it... but if we consider a _far_ much more likely event like some object from the sky falling directly on your head at the moment when you are doing a commit, that I would be really very unfortunate... So, maybe, you should rent space in a bunker first just to work safely...

Seriously, it is so ridiculous to worry so much about so improbable event, while in practice a lot of repository corruptions comes from unreliable DRAM, disk storage, or some other reasons. The mean time between failures for high quality components is only a few hundred years while doing a commit every second will take dozen million times more than the age of our universe to generate a collision. So, those probabilities are so different that there is nothing in our every day experiences that has the same scale difference. It is like a hair width and the distance to the closest star.

Dmitry