Re: Guix role in a free society

[Richard Sent <richard@freakingpenguin.com>]

> It pretty easy to see who most people that use Guix agree with that
> actually. Check what the CoC says right here

I believe that Guix can continue to achieve a welcoming, harassment-free
environment even if we're not able to support repo authorship history
modification. (Or non-destructive attribution.)

I'm not in favor of (mandatory and global) UUIDs. To my understanding
there are two options for how they could be implemented:

a) UUIDs are used with .mailmap

  1) This doesn't solve the problem since .mailmap itself is also
  tracked in git. Any old names/aliases are still in the repo.

  2) This would mask the name change. To my knowledge unless someone is
  actively browsing .mailmap's log, the old name shouldn't appear. I
  understand why people may feel that's insufficient though.

  3) I don't believe any mechanism stops someone from choosing to
  do this already?

b) The UUID->Name mapping is stored out of band (GitLab's unimplemented
solution)

  1) This adds additional complication to development (need to fetch
  files over a network at some point, be sure you're using the right
  UUID even if you change machines, update your out of band copy
  regularly, etc).

We may be able to partially resolve b) but I doubt it's possible to turn
it into a "no-impact" process. It almost certainly would add steps for
new contributors. We don't want even more barriers to their first patch.

We could choose to allow people to opt-in to using UUIDs and also use
out-of-band storage, I suppose, but that would only help those who
already suspected they'd want to change their name, but didn't want to
change it at that moment. Otherwise a) would suffice.

Perhaps there are better options I'm not thinking of.

Would UUIDs be valid for the copyright notices at the top of files?

-- 
Take it easy,
Richard Sent
Making my computer weirder one commit at a time.