Currently Nitpick uses a hexidecimal encoding for the issue identifiers. This is common, but the full length identifiers are quite long. As I discussed in http://travisbrown.ca/blog.html#TooMuchAboutDistributedBugTracking2013-04-20 it's possible to use other encodings, most of which have higher densities.
The hexidecimal encoding requires 64 characters for the full identifier.
One obvious encoding would be base36 (a-z0-9) which would only require 50 characters.
Base32 has a few variants which avoid characters which look alike. It would only require 52 characters.
I've thought about this and it doesn't seem worth the effort. Since Nitpick will disambiguate partial bug IDs you won't normally need more than 8 characters anyways and the savings from base32 or base36 aren't that great.
Currently Nitpick uses a hexidecimal encoding for the issue identifiers. This is common, but the full length identifiers are quite long. As I discussed in http://travisbrown.ca/blog.html#TooMuchAboutDistributedBugTracking2013-04-20 it's possible to use other encodings, most of which have higher densities. The hexidecimal encoding requires 64 characters for the full identifier. One obvious encoding would be base36 (a-z0-9) which would only require 50 characters. Base32 has a few variants which avoid characters which look alike. It would only require 52 characters.
Date: 2013-05-11 02:17:02
User: travisb
I've thought about this and it doesn't seem worth the effort. Since Nitpick will disambiguate partial bug IDs you won't normally need more than 8 characters anyways and the savings from base32 or base36 aren't that great.