If you’re going to build, say, a directory structure where a directory is named for a commit in a Git repository, and you want it to be short enough to make your eyes not bleed, but long enough that the chance of it colliding would be negligible, how much of the SHA substring is generally required?
Let’s say I want to uniquely identify this change: https://github.com/wycats/handlebars.js/commit/e62999f9ece7d9218b9768a908f8df9c11d7e920
I can use as little as the first four characters:
https://github.com/wycats/handlebars.js/commit/e629
But I feel like that would be risky. But ssuming a codebase that, over a couple of years, might have—say—30k changes, what are the chances of collision if I use 8 characters? 12? Is there a number that’s generally considered acceptable for this sort of thing?
