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[bug #61594] suggest new $(hash ...) function


From: anonymous
Subject: [bug #61594] suggest new $(hash ...) function
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2021 09:42:01 -0500 (EST)
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.55 Safari/537.36

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #61594 (project make):

These are all good and useful points, thanks. However, some counter-arguments:
I tried to be careful to distinguish "cryptographic" from
"low-collision-rate-hash" in the original description because I absolutely do
not want to "introduce cryptography to GNU make". It's unfortunate that the
two concepts tend to be implemented by the same algorithms and subject to the
same license and export rules but they remain logically different. Thus, while
accepting that things like export restrictions might need to be considered, I
suggest we elide terms like 'cryptography' from this discussion because it's
just about a hash.

My first counter-argument comes from the "$(shell git hash-object obj)"
suggestion which begs the question: if git, which relies heavily upon SHA-1,
is available, doesn't that mean SHA-1 is also natively available? I'm not
aware of git being restricted in any jurisdictions. It's certainly not my area
of expertise but I've never heard of export restrictions being an issue in git
which seems to have spread everywhere.

Second counter-argument: hashing algorithms cover a spectrum from original
checksum to the latest super-secure hash whatever that is today. GNU make
itself must have a hashing function built in - after all, you can't have a
hash table without a hash function. So it seems likely that there's a sweet
spot on this spectrum, some function which is both unrestricted and has a
sufficiently low collision rate, to do the job.

However, having made the suggestion I'm happy to let Paul dispose of it as he
likes. For my own purposes I'll probably look at the loadable module since the
shell is creaky and slow.

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