On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 00:27, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Kyle Moffett <kyle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> Heh, there's one other practical downside I can think of... >> >> If you create a bunch of commits with the same 8-hex-character prefix >> then suddenly the "git describe" logic for using the first 7 commit ID >> characters gets a whole lot less useful. > > In the sense that you need to cut and paste a lot more characters, you are > correct that it would make it less useful, but if you are talking about > uniqueness, you are mistaken. > > The rule is not "using the first 7 hexdigits", but is "using as many > hexdigits to make assure uniqueness, but use at least 7". Well, yes, but if you generate some 10 commits with the same 7-character prefix, run "git describe", and then generate another several with the same prefix... Chances are the previously-unique output of "git describe" is no longer unique. Also, even if you do use enough characters for it to be reliably unique, it's not really an abbreviation if your commit description is "v2.0.3-42-gdeadbeef04a69f", with that many characters you might as well just paste the whole SHA1 sum. With all that said, it is a very clever (and ugly) hack :-D. Kudos! Cheers, Kyle Moffett -- Curious about my work on the Debian powerpcspe port? I'm keeping a blog here: http://pureperl.blogspot.com/ -- 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