Re: the right to rewrite history to rectify the past (was Re: Concerns/questions around Software Heritage Archive)

["Philip McGrath" <philip@philipmcgrath.com>]

On Thu, Mar 21, 2024, at 11:11 AM, MSavoritias wrote:
> On 3/21/24 17:08, Giovanni Biscuolo wrote:
>> […]
>> I don't understand how using petnames, uuids or even a re:claimID
>> identity (see below) could solve the problem with "rewriting history" in
>> case a person wishes to change his or her previous _published_ name
>> (petname, uuid...) in an archived content-addressable storage system.
>
> It doesnt solve the problem of rewriting history. It solves the bug of 
> having names part of the git history.
>
> see also https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/20960 for Gitlab 
> doing the same thing.
>

Unless I’m missing something, the linked Gitlab issue seems to be a proposal by someone in February 2018 that Gitlab adopt some system of using UUIDs instead of author information. There was fairly limited discussion, with the last comment in May 2018. There does not seem to have been a consensus supporting the proposal, and I’m not seeing any indication that Gitlab plans to implement the proposal.

Furthermore, the author and committer metadata are not the only places where people’s names appear in Guix. For example, I know some font packages that mention the name of the font designer in the package’s description. More broadly, Guix also refers to package sources by their content hashes: most sources probably contain some people’s names, and any of these could face the same problems as names directly included in the Guix Git repository.

I strongly believe in the importance of protecting trans people from harassment. I don’t know how to solve the tension with long-term bit-for-bit reproducibility. 

Philip