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

[MSavoritias <email@msavoritias.me>]

On 3/18/24 16:19, Andreas Enge wrote:

> Am Mon, Mar 18, 2024 at 04:03:20PM +0200 schrieb MSavoritias:
>> Rewriting history is the wrong question imo. I dont think a request to
>> change all of the history of Guix will be accepted anyway.
>> A much easier thing to do is to change the approach in the future. And let
>> all the past history untouched.
> I was well thinking about the future history as well as the past one...
> Everything we do now becomes unmutable history in the future; so the
> question how we can rewrite an a priori unmutable history remains the same,
> regardless of the date when person X wants to be known as person Y: Also in
> the future, someone may wish to travel to a time before the change.
> And the fundamental problem of history rewriting remains; I do not see
> how we could simplify it. So I do not think that it is "a much easier
> thing to do". Please feel free to prove me wrong by making a concrete
> suggestion!

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


So no reason we couldn't do something like this.

>
> Am Mon, Mar 18, 2024 at 04:00:38PM +0200 schrieb MSavoritias:
>> On 3/18/24 15:12, Simon Tournier wrote:
>>> Again, this is an incorrect frame, IMHO.  Software Heritage (SWH) do the
>>> things you granted them to do.  SWH respects the “ethical” definition of
>>> “free software”.
>> You are bringing the legal argument again. The argument that you can do what
>> you want with Free Software is based around a licence which is a legal
>> construct of states.
> I think there is a misunderstanding here, rooted in the use of "you" in
> "you can do what you want". We need to be clear about whom we are speaking.
> There is SWH, and what they can do is a result of the free license. The
> other question is what we as the Guix community want to do (and can do);
> I would suggest to concentrate in our discussion on the latter, which is
> where we have agency.
>
> Andreas

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.


MSavoritias

>