On Thu, 2026-01-08 at 08:41 +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote: > I think this will be revisited in discussion again and again, because it > is not a simple technical matter with a simple solution, but there is > one approach that I didn't see suggested how to deal with this:
Another one: Would it be sufficient to `git rm` the files from the Debian specific branches and drop (and presumably block for future push) the non-Free blob objects from git repositories on Debian infra but to not scrub references to them e.g. from tree object's in the commit history? That would make those commits ones which couldn't easily be checked out, but the ones we ship going forward would be fine. I don't know how much git would scream on clone/push/pull (or log etc). I would suppose that git fsck would be quite unhappy. But maybe those are all either tolerable or addressable in ways which are better than rewriting or forking entirely? A user who really wanted/needed those blobs could presumably still fetch them into their local repo from some upstream repo if necessary. Possibly get-replace(1) might be some use here, e.g. to replace references to those blobs with some sort of "not DFSG Free.txt" placeholder, although refs/replace doesn't seem to be pushed/pulled. That would at least let you checkout the commit and maybe paper over cracks in other places. Ian.
