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> SHA-1 will still work fine for the purpose of git.

So why are they changing it? That's pretty strong evidence it's not fine. I found this Stackoverflow question, "Why does Git use a cryptographic hash function?" [1], which points to [2]. Note: pretty much every DVCS uses a cryptographic hash function. That doesn't seem like an accident.

Reading through some of these old posts and threads it seems like performance was the main factor combined with the expectation that SHA1 collisions just wouldn't be an issue. The latter I find to be surprisingly naive.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28792784/why-does-git-us...

[2]: https://ericsink.com/vcbe/html/cryptographic_hashes.html




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