Hi,
On Fri, 18 Jan 2019, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > On Thu, Jan 17 2019, Barret Rhoden wrote:
> >
> >> - die("Could not open skip list: %s", path);
> >> [...]
> >> + die("Could not open skip list: %s", path);
> >
> > You're just moving this around, but now that this has two uses let's say
> > "Could not open SHA-1 list; %s" or something like that.
> >
> >> + die("Invalid SHA-1: %s", sb.buf);
> >
> > Unlike Johannes I think it's fine to leave this. This file-format is
> > SHA-1 only now. We can cross the bridge of making it (and others)
> > SHA-256 somehow when we come to that, whether that'll be allowing
> > variable width or a different file.
>
> I tend to agree. The Documentation/glossary-contents.txt makes it
> clear that "object name" is the most formal term to use here, with
> synonyms like "object identifier" and much less formal "hash". For
> now, "SHA-1" is good enough, even though "object name" is acceptable
> if we really want to future-proof. But I would suspect that people
> would colloquially keep saying Shaah-one even when we start using
> different hash function(s), so such a future-proofing may not be
> worth it ;-)
By that reasoning all the preparatory work for switching to SHA-256 and
making the references in the Git code base less tied to SHA-1 would be
irrelevant now, "because we can cross that bridge when we reach it".
You are suggesting to incur technical debt here. Let's be smarter about
this. We do not *have* to incur said technical debt. Nothing (except
mental laziness) makes use do that.
Instead, we can make our load "when we reach that bridge" a lot lighter
by already doing the right thing.
BTW I totally disagree that the skip list is bound to be SHA-1. It is
bound to be a list of object names, that's what its purpose is, and just
because we happen to not yet support other hash algorithms but SHA-1 does
not mean that the skip list is fixed to SHA-1. It'll always be whatever
hash algorithm is used in the current repository.
So no, introducing mentions of "SHA-1" *now* is not a smart thing to do.
Ciao,
Johannes
