Re: [RFC PATCH 0/6] Git 3.0: restrict hex object IDs to lowercase only
- From
brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
- Date
- Aug 2, 2026, 21:55 UTC
- Message-ID
- <am-8vm5QwLQhiXaO@fruit.crustytoothpaste.net>
- In-Reply-To
- <20260801144527.GF2041176@coredump.intra.peff.net>
On 2026-08-01 at 14:45:27, Jeff King wrote:
Show 24 quoted lines
> Another interesting case is upper-case hex within objects:
>
> $ git rev-parse HEAD
> b85b9595a8136c79551340c3d73443a62eddd893
>
> $ git cat-file commit HEAD |
> perl -lpe '
> if (/^parent (.*)/) {
> $_ = "parent " . uc($1);
> }
> ' |
> git hash-object -w -t commit --stdin
> 5a08c6b3f06d91c4a09c8d7ea6e9c8ce200b7698
>
> Now there's a parallel history of otherwise identical commits. I think
> this is mostly "if it hurts don't do it", but we generally try to avoid
> multiple representations of the same data within the object model.
>
> I think only commits and tags are subject to this (because the tree
> hashes are binary). I don't know if you'd be able to stumble into this
> accidentally with most Git commands. We don't intentionally normalize
> case anywhere, but I think most code will round-trip through a binary
> hash at some point (so "git commit-tree 1234ABCD" would incidentally
> normalize the case).Yes, this is true. I agree that multiple representations is a problem, and although that can be an issue with signatures, we shouldn't make it worse.
In addition, those objects cannot be round-tripped through the interoperability code (which only writes lowercase object IDs), so they're effectively locked to SHA-1 only.
-- brian m. carlson (they/them) Toronto, Ontario, CA