On Mon, Dec 05, 2016 at 10:01:19AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > That said, I think the right patch may be to just drop --abbrev > > entirely. > > ... > > I think at that point it was a noop, as 7 should have been the default. > > And now we probably ought to drop it, so that we can use the > > auto-scaling default. > > Yeah, I agree. > > It does mean that snapshot binaries built out of the same commit in > the same repository before and after a repack have higher chances of > getting named differently, which may surprise people, but that > already is possible with a fixed length if the repacking involves > pruning (albeit with lower probabilities), and I do not think it is > a problem.
I think that the number is already unstable, even with --abbrev, as it just specifies a minimum. So any operation that creates objects has a possibility of increasing the length. Or more likely, two people describing the same version may end up with different strings because they have different objects in their repositories (e.g., I used to carry's trast's git-notes archive of the mailing list which added quite a few objects). I agree that having it change over the course of a repack is slightly _more_ surprising than those cases, but ultimately the value just isn't stable. -Peff
