Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [ANNOUNCEMENT] /Arch/ embraces `git'

[Jacob Gorm Hansen]

Tom Lord wrote:

> Stop panicing.  You are just a tiny bit confused about the tech
> here.   It should tell you something that Linus and I, whom you 
> would seem to think are coming from opposing perspectives, are
> actually in strong agreement.
>
> It's confused to think that blob addresses and revision names are
> alternatives for the same thing.  The truth is closer to a revision
> name resolving to a blob address, in some contexts but not all.

No, I was not confused, and I was only mentioning revision names as an 
example of an excellent solution to the problem of globally unique 
identifier for some given object. Docs on git are hard to find at the 
moment, but to me it looks like a content-addressed file system. I still 
maintain that this is a bad idea unless there is a clear strategy for 
dealing with collisions, and that it creates just as many problems as it 
solves.

Funny thing, I was actually trying to create a similar versioning 
file-system about 1.5 years ago (though using md5 rather than SHA-1, and 
using postgresql rather than the file system as my index), but have 
since be convinced that context-adressing by hash is abuse of the 
hash-functions for a purpose for which they were not designed.

Jacob