[PD-dev] quick demo of git author garbage

[Chris McCormick]

On 05/05/16 14:08, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> By substituting the author string with obvious garbage-- like only
> allowing the
> word "dingus" to be shown there. :)
...
> I guess I'd be a bit happier if git required the committer to explicitly
> transfer authorship in this case (either with a flag or a separate
> command).
> "Foo typed 'Linus' here" is better than "someone typed 'Linus' and maybe
> Foo is validating that it was Linus, or maybe Foo did not notice, or maybe
> Foo does not care...".

Sure but how is git (or other tools) supposed to know this "explicit 
ownership transfer" is even happening? How is it supposed to validate 
the "correct" author? How is git supposed to know that "Foo typed 
'Linus'" and not Linus or that Linus isn't correcting a commit 
erroneously attributed to Foo?

Git authorship and committer fields are completely malleable by anybody 
on their local machine and anybody with push access to a repo can push 
[-f] whatever authorship changes they like.

You probably realise this and I'm missing some deeper point you are 
making, but you can easily change those fields with environment 
variables, command line flags, the git-filter-branch and git-rebase 
commands, and even during a single commit trivially (as I think you are 
demonstrating here).

If your aim is to bring greater awareness to the fact that git makes no 
pretense at identity management or authentication then I'm 100% on board 
and in agreement! \o/

If not, I'm sorry, I'm deeply confused! (Not that unusual a state of 
affairs heh.)

Cheers,

Chris.

-- 
http://mccormick.cx/