Re: gnulib-tool --version

[Bruno Haible]

Eric Blake wrote:
> According to Bruno Haible on 3/14/2008 5:52 PM:
> |   This does not tell me anything. If in 6 months sometimes says "my gnulib
> |   is version 0.0.430-8915-dirty", how do I find out what date it is?
> 
> git log 8915

With some 6% probability, this will not work.

Take an example: Until 3 days ago, 
  $ git log 532f
was equivalent to 
  $ git log 532f4b4a94e7df8e730e433d4cba9e4119641691

But then there was a commit 532f65ac8de5a89ea0b159fc3b76ead5a53e9fea. Since
then,
  $ git log 532f
gives an error message
  error: short SHA1 532f is ambiguous.
  fatal: ambiguous argument '532f': unknown revision or path not in the working 
tree.
  Use '--' to separate paths from revisions

So far we have 9619 commits total,
                640 conflicts among the first 4 hex digits,
                 34 conflicts among the first 5 hex digits,
                  3 conflicts among the first 6 hex digits.

To exclude the problem of ambiguous commit ids, with a reasonable probability,
I would therefore take the first 8 hex digits, not only the first 4.

Bruno