There Is (Almost) Never One "Only Other Way"

Posted Mar 1, 2017 15:32 UTC (Wed) by ianmcc (subscriber, #88379)
In reply to: There Is (Almost) Never One "Only Other Way" by linuxrocks123
Parent article: Linus on Git and SHA-1

If I understand correctly, this basically amounts to tagging commits with some kind of 'unique' identifier, that is chosen by the committer. That might prevent some problems, but accidents or malicious commits could still cause problems?

There Is (Almost) Never One "Only Other Way"

Posted Mar 1, 2017 16:51 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. You're relying on fallible humans to come up with something unique. Humans are *terrible* at this. Hash functions are far more reliable. Replacing something that has fabulously rare collisions with something that has collisions all the time whenever humans make a mistake (restore from backup, whatever) is not any sort of improvement. The resulting system would have incessant collisions and would be deeply unreliable.