Assorted links for Friday, January 10:

1. Colliding with the SHA prefix of Linux’s initial Git commit

   There was a recent discussion about how Linux’s “Fixes” tag, which traditionally uses the 12 character commit SHA prefix, has an ever increasing chance of collisions. There are already 11-character collisions, and Geert wanted to raise the minimum short id to 16 characters.

   Tools like linux-next’s “Fixes tag checker”, the Linux CNA’s commit parser, and my own CVE lifetime analysis scripts do programmatic analysis of the “Fixes” tag and had no support for collisions (even shorter existing collisions).

   So, in an effort to fix these tools, I broke them with commit 1da177e4c3f4 (“docs: git SHA prefixes are for humans”):

2. FreeBSD Considers Making Use Of Rust Within Its Base System
3. The Architect’s Guide to Open Table Formats and Object Storage
4. Alerts Are Fundamentally Messy
5. Databases in 2024: A Year in Review