Karl Fogel <kfo...@red-bean.com> writes:

> Now, how hard would this be to actually implement?

To have a more or less accurate estimate, I went ahead and prepared the
first-cut implementation of an approach that makes the pristine checksum
kind configurable in a working copy.

The current implementation passes all tests in my environment and seems to
work in practice.  It is available on the branch:

  https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/branches/pristine-checksum-kind

The implementation on the branch allows creating working copies that use a
checksum kind other than SHA-1.

The checksum kind is persisted in the settings table.  Upgraded working copies
of the older formats will have SHA-1 recorded as their pristine checksum kind
and will continue to use it for compatibility.  Newly created working copies
of the latest format (with --compatible-version=1.15 or --store-pristine=no),
as currently implemented, will use the new pristine checksum kind.

Currently, as a proof-of-concept, the branch uses salted SHA-1 as the new
pristine checksum kind.  For the production-ready state, I plan to support
using multiple new checksum types such as SHA-256.  I think that it would
be useful for future compatibility, because if we encounter any issues with
one checksum kind, we could then switch to a different kind without having
to change the working copy format.

One thing worth noting is that ra_serf contains a specific optimization for
the skelta-style updates that allows skipping a GET request if the pristine
store already contains an entry with the specified SHA-1 checksum.  Switching
to a different checksum type for the pristine entries is going to disable
that specific optimization.  Re-enabling it would require an update of the
server-side.  I consider this to be out of scope for this branch.

I can complete the work on this branch and bring it to a production-ready
state, assuming there are no objections.


Thanks,
Evgeny Kotkov

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