Re: Concerns/questions around Software Heritage Archive

[Tomas Volf]

On 2024-03-16 20:24:50 +0200, MSavoritias wrote:
> > > I was also distressed to see how poorly they treated a developer who
> > > wished to update their name:
> > > https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/4968198-the-software-heritag
> > > https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/5052044-the-software-heritag
> > This is probably worth thinking about as Guix is in a similar situation
> > regarding publishing source code, and people potentially wanting to
> > change historical source code both in things Guix packages and Guix
> > itself.
> >
> > Like Software Heritage, there's cryptographical implications for
> > rewriting the Git history and modifying source tarballs or nars that
> > contain source code.
> >
> > We have 17TiB of compressed source code and built software stored for
> > bordeaux.guix.gnu.org now and we should probably work out how to handle
> > people asking for things to be removed or changed (for any and all
> > reasons).
> >
> > It's probably worth working out our position on this in advance of
> > someone asking.
>
> I would go a step further actually. Software Heritage is effectively
> breaking CoC of Guix now.
>
> Im not proposing removing all code or something obviously that connects to
> Software Heritage, but there should be some social action we can take.
>
>
> For example until the matter is resolved and Software Heritage implements a
> process that respects trans rights Software Heritage should not be welcome
> in Guix Spaces.

I did skim the articles and I did not see any details on what the technical
solution should be.  SWH, among other things, archives the repositories and
allows fetching them by commit hash.  At least as far as I know.  Since that
commit hash does contain the author field, what is the proposed solution here to
change the author name without changing the commit hash?

While I am not a huge fan of the ability to map the "fake" author name over the
real one in the UI, what other solutions do you or the article author envision?
I am genuinely curious what you think can be done here.

Have a nice day,
Tomas Volf

--
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

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