On 8/11/25 2:17 PM, brian m. carlson wrote:
To see how many leading letters of a given full object name is sufficiently unambiguous, the algorithm starts from a initial length, guessed based on the estimated number of objects in the repository, and see if another object that shares the prefix, and keeps extending the abbreviation. The loop stops at GIT_MAX_RAWSZ, which is counted as the number of bytes, since 5b20ace6 (sha1_name: unroll len loop in find_unique_abbrev_r(), 2017-10-08); before that change, it extended up to GIT_MAX_HEXSZ, which is the correct limit because the loop is adding one output letter per iteration.
I'm new to all this but the way I did it is much simpler. What I did was to check all the files in the appropriate object store directory (e.g. .git/objects/XX, where XX are the first 2 letters of the object given on the command line. If any of the filenames in that directory start with the string given on the command line, minus the first 2 letters, then that's a match. If more than one filename matches then that's ambiguous. What's wrong with this approach? Jon
