Re: Concerns/questions around Software Heritage Archive

[MSavoritias <email@msavoritias.me>]

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.


I agree that making some rules about names that are going to be wrong at 
some point or in some place is the wrong solution long term for sure.


MSavoritias