On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 18:11, Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 24 Apr 2009, Michael Witten wrote: > >> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 17:18, Michael Witten <mfwitten@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > In fact, I think masking this kind of thing with a catch-all word >> > 'reference' is a bad idea. Rather than being hidden, it should be >> > exposed: I think it would be beneficial to use the word 'address' >> > rather than 'reference' when talking about the SHA-1 names. Then HEAD >> > could be called a pointer variable, etc. >> > >> > So, a pointer variable's value is an object address that is the >> > location of an object in git 'memory'. I think using this approach >> > would make things significantly more transparent. >> >> In fact, it's not particularly important that SHA-1 is used to compute >> the address into git memory. The only thing that's important is that >> the address is determined by content alone (I'm not even sure that >> specifying that the address is a cryptographically sound hash of the >> content is important; shouldn't that follow from the declaration that >> it must be uniquely based on content alone?); the fact that's a SHA-1 >> is purely an implementation detail, and so it shouldn't appear >> prominently in the documentation. >> >> So, what do you say? >> >> Let's start a reformation of the git terminology to use analogies that >> have been around since the dawn of computing: 'memory', 'address', and >> 'pointer'. > > I actually think calling them "sha1s" is better, simply because this bit > of jargon doesn't mean anything else (git deals with email, so "address" > is overloaded). I don't know if I buy that reason; the human brain is pretty good with context. I would at least like 'location' better. > And the term is already in use for this particular case, > and it doesn't mean anything else at all (since, of course, the crypto > thing is "SHA-1", not "sha1"), and it's short (which is important for > making it easy to look at usage help). What happens when SHA-1 is shown to be broken or there is a better alternative? Then we'll see "sha1 for historical reasons"... bleh! -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html