Re: rewriting history; Was: Concerns/questions around Software Heritage Archive

[MSavoritias <email@msavoritias.me>]

On 3/18/24 17:14, Andreas Enge wrote:

> Am Mon, Mar 18, 2024 at 04:33:49PM +0200 schrieb MSavoritias:
>> Actually gitlab already is facing something like that and they are doing
>> what was proposed elsewhere: mapping of UUIDs to display names
>> https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/20960
> Interesting, thanks! It is something that maybe could be implemented by
> Savannah, but it would probably require a bit of thought. And yet again,
> somehow the mapping uuid<->"real" names would have to be public (people
> would "git clone" commits with uuids, and would need to locally replace
> them by "real" names); so people can always keep copies of the mapping
> over time.
Sure. But we can only say about Guix not everything else.
> I am also not quite sure about the signing process for committers;
> in principle keys are enough, but in GPG they are tied to email addresses,
> and I do not know whether we use this in Guix.
I hope we don't because i use ssh to sign commits personally :D
>
> In the end, my impression is this will not achieve much more than what we
> already have with the .mailmap approach. In a sense, everyone would use
> a pseudonym (their uuid), and then we would keep a mapping between these
> pseudonyms and, well, "real" names or other pseudonyms chosen by the
> contributors...
>
> Hm, this could indeed be implemented exactly with .mailmap, no?
> We would need to enforce that authors use a uuid of a specific format,
> and potentially an empty or dummy email address, or another uuid.
> Then we could keep a .mailmap file. The history of "real" identities
> would still be visible in the git history, but as said above, anyway
> we could not prevent people from storing the association information
> over time.

Nicknames may change tho. UUIDs are not in any way meaningful to humans 
so i doubt we would need to change them.

I have changed nicknames once for example.

>> Right fair. As I have said before SWH does break Guix CoC effectively right
>> now.
>> So what Guix does from this point on will effectively dictate if the CoC is
>> valid or not.
> Well, the CoC is valid on our communication channels; so what SWH does with
> our software is outside its scope (that is governed by the license).
>
> Andreas


My question was more like:


In the next Guix Days or any Guix conference, do we allow SWH to 
participate if this matter is still unresolved?

Because we would be basically inviting people that don't respect the CoC.


MSavoritias