Re: [PATCH 4/4] core.abbrev: raise the default abbreviation to 12 hexdigits

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 04:44:00AM +0200, SZEDER Gábor wrote:

> >     So 12 seems reasonable, and the only downside for it (or for "13", for
> >     that matter) is a few extra bytes. I dunno, maybe people will really
> >     hate that, but I have a feeling these are mostly cut-and-pasted anyway.
> 
> I for one raise my hand in protest...
> 
> "few extra bytes" is not the only downside, and it's not at all about
> how many characters are copy-and-pasted.  In my opinion it's much more
> important that this change wastes 5 columns worth of valuable screen
> real estate e.g. for 'git blame' or 'git log --oneline' in projects
> that don't need it and certainly won't ever need it.

True. The core of the issue is that we really only care about this
minimum length when _storing_ an abbreviation, but we don't know when
the user is just looking at it in the moment, and when they are going to
stick it in a commit message, email, or bug tracker.

In an ideal world, anybody who was about to store it would run "git
describe" or something to come up with some canonical reference format.
And we could just bump the default minimum there. Personally, I almost
exclusively cite commits as the output of:

  git log -1 --pretty='tformat:%h (%s, %ad)' --date=short

and I'd be fine to stick "--abbrev=12" in there for future-proofing. But
I don't know what the kernel or other projects do.

I'd also be curious to know if the patch I sent in [1] to more
aggressively prefer commits would make this less of an issue, and people
wouldn't care as much about using longer hashes in the first place. So
one option is to merge that (and possibly even make it the default) and
see if people still care in 6 months.

-Peff

[1] http://public-inbox.org/git/20160927123801.3bpdg3hap3kzzfmv@sigill.intra.peff.net/