The default of 7 comes from fairly early in git development, when
seven hex digits was a lot (it covers about 250+ million hash
values). Back then I thought that 65k revisions was a lot (it was what
we were about to hit in BK), and each revision tends to be about 5-10
new objects or so, so a million objects was a big number.
These days, the kernel isn't even the largest git project, and even
the kernel has about 220k revisions (_much_ bigger than the BK tree
ever was) and we are approaching two million objects. At that point,
seven hex digits is still unique for a lot of them, but when we're
talking about just two orders of magnitude difference between number
of objects and the hash size, there _will_ be collisions in truncated
hash values. It's no longer even close to unrealistic - it happens all
the time.
We should both increase the default abbrev that was unrealistically
small, _and_ add a way for people to set their own default per-project
in the git config file.
This is the first step to first make it configurable; the default of 7
is not raised yet.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
dce9648916