Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 00/17] cruft packs

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 May 2022 02:06:09 +0200

On Wed, May 25 2022, Taylor Blau wrote:

> On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 03:59:24PM -0400, Derrick Stolee wrote:
>> I'd much rather have a consistent and proven way of specifying the
>> hash value (using the oid_version() helper) than to try and make a
>> new mechanism.
>
> To be clear, I absolutely don't think any of us should have the attitude
> of repeating past bad decisions for the sake of consistency.
>
> As best I can tell, our (Jonathan and I's) disagreement is on whether
> using "1" and "2" to identify which hash function is used by the .mtimes
> file is OK or not. I happen to think that it is acceptable, so the
> choice to continue to adopt this pattern was motivated by being
> consistent with a pattern that is good and works.

I don't have a strong opinion on whether we "bless" that or not, and say
that we should just use 1, 2 etc. going forward or not.

But I do think that us doing so initially wasn't intentional, and has
been in opposition to a strongly worded claim in a comment in hash.h
(which I modified in my earlier related RFC series).

So maybe not part of this series, but it seems prudent if you feel
strongly about using this for new formats over what hash.h is currently
recommending that we have some patch sooner than later to update it
accordingly.