4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904 is a special hash value in git which denotes an empty tree. And it does not change from repo to repo. This opens way to some neat tricks, but how the hell would one remember this value? You don’t need to.
Colin Schimmelfing:
In both of the links that mentioned the special hash, it looks like there is another way to find the magic value, a little faster:
> git hash-object -t tree –stdin < /dev/null
4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904
Thus you get the hash of the ‘null’ tree.
The author of the post mentions about changing/diff-ing the first commit using this, but remember that since git 1.7.12 or so you have this awesome –root flag for git-rebase which does wonders in this particularly intimidating situation.
So, if you want to amend the initial commit or add one after some commits (humans forget), you can just:
git rebase -i –root
Now just do whatever you want in the editor window that pops up. Anything’s possible with git-rebase.
Git uses SHA-1 hashes to identify its objects (commits, refs, blobs, etc). It assumes that if the SHA-1 hashes of two objects are equal, then the two objects themselves are equal, hence there’s no need to store both in the repo. In other words, if the hashes of two different objects turned out to be equal at some point, Git wouldn’t be able to handle that!
But what are the chance of such a SHA-1 collision? This was discussed in the Git mailing list today and a recent analysis on this problem was shed into light. This analysis has used the famous Birthday Paradox and come up with a formula to determine the probability. It quotes,
“Applying the formula for 160bit SHA-1 you need 1.7e23 objects to get a 1% chance of collision. The current Linus kernel repository has 2.7 million objects. So to get a collision you’d need a repository that’s 6e16 times larger. That should be plenty.
For some wacky perspective that’s 10 million kernel sized contributions for every man woman and child on earth together in a single repository. It would seem git will reach plenty of other bottlenecks before SHA-1 becomes a problem…”
The probability is, of course, still non-zero. But don’t ever expect to witness such a collision before you die.
