Re: Concerns/questions around Software Heritage Archive

[Ian Eure <ian@retrospec.tv>]

MSavoritias <email@msavoritias.me> writes:

> On 3/17/24 13:53, paul wrote:
>> Hi all ,
>>
>> thank you MSavoritias for bringing up points that many of us
>> share. It's clearly a tradeoff what to do about the past. For 
>> the
>> future, as Christpher already stated, we need a serious 
>> solution
>> that we can uphold as a free software project that does not 
>> alienate
>> users or contributors.
>>
>> My opinion is that names are just wrong to be included, not 
>> only
>> because of deadnames, but in general having a database with a 
>> column
>> first_name and a column second_name is something only a 35 yrs 
>> old
>> white cis boy could have thought was a good idea to model the
>> spectrum of names humans use all over the world:
>>
>> https://web.archive.org/web/20240317114846/https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
>> If we'd really need to identify contributors, and obviously 
>> Guix
>> doesn't, we could use an UUID/machine readable identifier which 
>> can
>> then be mapped to a displayed name. I believe git can already 
>> be
>> configured to do so.
>>
>>
>> giacomo
>>
>>
> The uuid sounds like a very interesting solution indeed.
>
> I wonder how easy it could be to add it to git.
>

This also seems like interesting territory to explore.  The 
concerns raised around rewriting history have valid points; I 
think it’s impractical to rewrite history any time a change needs 
to happen, as that would be an ongoing source of disruption.  But 
rewriting history *once*, to switch to a more general mechanism, 
seems like a reasonable trade to me.  This also presents an 
opportunity: we could combine this with a default branch switch 
from master to main.  A news entry left as the final commit in 
master could inform people of whatever steps may be needed to 
update (if that can’t be automated), and the main branch would 
contain the rewritten history.

It’s certainly not a perfect solution, but it seems pragmatic.

  — Ian