Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

Posted Mar 30, 2024 8:11 UTC (Sat) by westerntelegraphic (subscriber, #132321)
In reply to: Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git by atnot
Parent article: Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

> People do also change things like names for a variety of reasons and usually really appreciate those names not lingering in old issues forever

This is a already a problem with anything built on top of git -- the Author and Committer headers contain user.name. Pijul has a much better solution: it identifies users by an ed25519 key (which is part of the commit-hash). There is a separate, ephemeral mapping from ed25519 keys to human-readable names (each signed by the key of course) which is not part of the hash chain: https://pijul.org/manual/keys.html

In fact, pretty much all the complaints you made apply equally to git itself: "Git security" -- obvs. "Data size: Lore.kernel.org rotates git archives" -- as a convenience; their size hasn't been a problem as you predict it would. "Moderation: Having this floating cloud of contributor nodes without seemingly any mechanism for proper moderation is just negligent" -- that's exactly what the commercial software industry said the problem with open source was, back in the 1990s.

And yes, we get it, you don't like cryptography.

Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

Posted Mar 31, 2024 14:40 UTC (Sun) by gray_-_wolf (subscriber, #131074) [Link] (1 responses)

The pijul's use of keys is interesting, however raises few questions the link does not answer.

1. How are people "from outside" referenced? For example, I (not a pijul user) report some bug via email. In some projects, adding Reported-by: X Y into the commit message is customary. How would that be handled?

2. And follow up on the same topic, are any references to usernames/emails in commit messages (reviewed-by, co-authored, ...) automatically replaced by the corresponding key? Or is that left as an exercise to the commit author?

Would you happen to know the answers?

Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

Posted Apr 1, 2024 12:07 UTC (Mon) by spacefrogg (subscriber, #119608) [Link]

1. It would not be handled at all. The commit message is just immutable data. So, unless you functionalize it again by defining special syntax and semantics that interprets "Reported-by: " content, it would not be replaced by anything in the future.

2. All content inside commit messages is handled as described in 1. It could be considered a widespread mis-use of commit messages to bake ill-defined semantics into them and apply social norms on top. That is not what they are supposed to be used for or what their data model can meaningfully support. This means they will always break current or future social norms one way or another.