Re: Concerns/questions around Software Heritage Archive

[MSavoritias <email@msavoritias.me>]

On 3/17/24 11:39, Lars-Dominik Braun wrote:
> Hey,
>
>> I have heard folks in the Guix maintenance sphere claim that we never rewrite git history in Guix, as a matter of policy. I believe we should revisit that policy (is it actually written anywhere?) with an eye towards possible exceptions, and develop a mechanism for securely maintaining continuity of Guix installations after history has been rewritten so that we maintain this as a technical possibility in the future, even if we should choose to use it sparingly.
> the fallout of rewriting Guix’ git history would be devastating. It
> would break every single Guix installation, because
>
> a) `guix pull` authenticates commits and we might lose our trust anchor
> if we rewrite history earlier than the introduction of this feature,
> b) `guix pull` outright rejects changes to the commit history to prevent
> downgrade attacks.
>
> Additionally it would break every single existing usage of the
> time machine and thereby completely defeat the goal of providing
> reproducible software environments since the commit hash is used to
> identify the point in time to jump to.
>
> I doubt developing “mechanisms” – whatever they look like – would
> be worth the effort. Our contributors matter, but so do our users. Never
> ever rewriting our git history is a tradeoff we should make for our users.
>
> Lars
>
>
Thats a good point. in the sense that its a tradeoff here and I 
absolutely agree.


But let me add some food for thought here:

1. Were the social aspects considered when the system came into place?

2. Is it more important for the system to stay as is than to welcome new 
contributors?

3. You mention "its a tradeoff we should make for our users". How many 
trans people where involved in that decision and how much did their 
opinion matter in this?


I am saying this because giving power to people(what is called users) is 
not only handling them code or make sure everything is free software.

Its also the hard part of making sure the voices of people that can not 
code is heard and is participating and taking in mind.

I am not trying to say what we should do about commit history rewriting 
here. Personally the tradeoffs are probably worth it.

But I am trying to say what Guix should do as a culture over including 
people or excluding in the case of Software Heritage.


MSavoritias