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Wouldn't it have been better if we could use something other than SHA1 as the actual name of something?

Where in the worst dystopian parts of software do we do this?

The SHA1 is kind of a security feature if anything, a side-show thing that should be nestled 1-layer deep into the UI and probably most people are unaware of.

Whereas commits and branches should be designed specifically for the user - not 'externalized artifacts' of some acyclic graph implementation.

Git triggers a product designers OCD so hard, it's hard for some of us to not disdain it for spite.



I don’t want to make up a good name for every commit. Good comments are hard enough.

A SHA-1 might not look friendly to a dev who doesn’t understand it, but as someone who works with hash values all the time, having my repo be a Merkle tree gives me a warm fuzzy.


You wouldn't 'make one up' there would be an automatic variation of Semantic Versioning, or something actually useful.

Your 'warm and fuzzy' comes at the cost of confusion (even to yourself), not having any clue what the information really means.

It's not even clear that it's a commit, it could be anything.

This posture is exactly what I'm complaining about: it's objectively bad design engineering, embraced as though somehow it's 'smart'.

Git has a few problems like this.


Git has problems: stipulated. Improvements in design are possible: also stipulated.

But, your reply is annoying in opining about my mental state and preferences. How am I confused by the SHA-1 commits, exactly? And how am I unclear that I’m looking at commits when I issue a “git log”?




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