[Monotone-devel] Re: Hash collisions resiliency

[Peter Simons]

Nathan Myers writes:

 > The reason for our bemusement is that people demanding to
 > know how they can recover from a hash collision display
 > no such trepidation over much more devastating events
 > that will occur a billion billion billion billion times
 > more frequently.

Well, this is the Monotone developers mailing list, so I'm
not particularly astonished that people worry about hash
collisions in Monotone here rather than about the chances of
being struck by lightning after winning the lottery. ;-)

I guess what Tom wanted to know (and what I wanted to know
too) is: _if_ a hash collides, what exactly happens? What
does it _mean_ for your database?

That's not an inane question, IMHO, and "read the source
code" may be a correct answer but it is not a very helpful
one. I don't understand the internals of Monotone, so I
depend on getting the answers from people who do. It would
be a shame if the tone on this list were to become one were
I (and others) don't dare to ask these questions anymore.

Having said that, I believe that making fun of people who
don't understand what they are talking about but keep
talking nonetheless is great and no such opportunity should
be passed up on. I just didn't have the impression that this
was the case here.

The documentation and FAQ contain a lot of material about
the hash collision problem, but apparently there _are_
unanswered questions -- why else would the subject come up
again and again?

Alright. Enough meta discussion for now. ;-)

Peter