Re: [PATCH 19/20] abbrev: support relative abbrev values

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 13, 2018, 22:34 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqa7ry5n9h.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <871sdawcmh.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> E.g. here's a breakdown of my dotfiles repo:
>
>     $ git -c core.abbrev=4 log  --pretty=format:%h|perl -nE 'chomp;say length'|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr
>         784 4
>          59 5
>           7 6
>
> I don't have a single commit that needs 7 characters, yet that's our
> default. This is a sane trade-off for the kernel, but for something
> that's just a toy or something you're playing around with something
> shorter can make sense.
>
> SHA-1s aren't just written down, but also e.g. remembered in wetware
> short-term memory.

That's a fine example of what I called "supporting absurdly small absolute values like 4"; I still do not see why you want "negative relative values" from that example.