Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Experiment: enable github pull requests

[Lynne]

On 13/02/2025 03:59, Soft Works wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel-boun...@ffmpeg.org> On Behalf Of Timo
Rothenpieler
Sent: Donnerstag, 13. Februar 2025 02:52
To: ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org
Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Experiment: enable github pull requests

On 13.02.2025 01:40, Soft Works wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel-boun...@ffmpeg.org> On Behalf Of
Romain Beauxis
Sent: Donnerstag, 13. Februar 2025 01:25
To: FFmpeg development discussions and patches <ffmpeg-
de...@ffmpeg.org>
Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Experiment: enable github pull requests

Le mer. 12 févr. 2025 à 18:17, Soft Works
<softworkz-at-hotmail....@ffmpeg.org> a écrit :

-----Original Message-----
From: ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel-boun...@ffmpeg.org> On Behalf Of

Timo

Rothenpieler
Sent: Donnerstag, 13. Februar 2025 00:34
To: ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org
Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Experiment: enable github pull

requests

On 13.02.2025 00:07, Soft Works wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel-boun...@ffmpeg.org> On Behalf

Of

Timo

Rothenpieler
Sent: Mittwoch, 12. Februar 2025 22:33
To: ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org
Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Experiment: enable github pull

requests

On 12.02.2025 22:22, Stephen Hutchinson wrote:

Are all accounts restricted to owning a maximum of 0 repositories by
default, or is it set to 0 only for those that sign up through one of
the external logins?

It's set to 0 by default, to avoid spammers uploading junk, or just
people (ab)using it for non-ffmpeg things.

You can open issues and comment on existing PRs.
And also create PRs using the AGit workflow:
https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/agit-support/

For those who are too lazy to look it up:

The "Agit workflow" requires you to use non-standard Git "push-

options"

(either -o or --push-options):

git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master -o topic="topic-branch" \
     -o title="Title of the PR" \
     -o description="# The PR Description
This can be **any** markdown content.\n
- [x] Ok"

This means essentially that our attempt to move away from the e-mail-

based

submission procedure to something easy and user-friendly, would end

up

in

replacing the current rarely-known mechanism with another even more

rare

and obscure procedure which would (again) force everybody to use the

Git

command line because it's (again) not supported by any tooling except

Git

CLI.

I'm afraid, but from my point of view, this doesn't match the objective.

The only alternative is to completely lock down the instance, and not
allow new users at all without manual approval of each and every one.

People can just ask to be allowed to fork, but by default, allowing it
is not feasible.

Hm, please help me understand what kind of spam we're talking about

here.

I can't imagine somebody would take the effort for selling some pills to

ffmpeg

developers. When it's about advertising anything, that's not the kind of

reach

those people are typically looking for.

Or is it about misusing repos for storage of illegal content? The largest file

currently is just 953kB, so we could enforce a limit small enough to make it
unattractive for this purpose (unlike GitHub with 100MB per file).

We could also disallow repos with custom content (i.e. only forks of

ffmpeg

are allowed as repo content).

Then I wonder, where would be the harm? Some thousand unused forks

of

ffmpeg shouldn't be a problem - but maybe I'm overseeing something?

There are all sorts of copyrightable material that can be embedded
into a git repo.

That's why I mentioned that a file size limit could prevent this. With a 2 MB

limit per file, it becomes totally unattractive for this kind of abuse.

That doesn't seem feasible to implement, given it's git.
Not even sure how to implement such a limit at all with git.
Some hook would need to check every file on push, which I don't think is
something that readily exists.

GitHub does it. I think a pre-receive hook can do it. AI spits out a 10 line
Bash script. Might be wrong as usual, but the principle should work.

AFAIK, you are only responsible to take stuff down once you get notified,

you don't need to actively look for anything.

I still wouldn't want to be the one hosting who knows what of illegal
shit on our servers.

The nature of illegal shit these days involves a certain size - as said, I 
don't believe that it's attractive for anybody when you can store max 2 MB 
files. Splitting it into a RAR set like in earlier days is also not something 
worth the effort, give that so many better alternatives exist.

Also keep in mind that if they fork the FFmpeg repo, and then push
something big and bad into that fork,

^^ File size limit

it ends up in the same backing storage of git objects.
So it's not even trivial to just delete it again, and bar access to it.

If these are just branches, why would it be non-trivial to delete them?
I would expect that from forgejo to be handled when a forked repo gets deleted, 
don't you think they would do so?

Also, I wonder how this would be different from attachments on

https://trac.ffmpeg.org ? There's no requirement for user "approval" as well..

We're just relatively lucky that trac is pretty uncommon and spambots
targetting are more rare.
Also, our custom-baked captcha for trac has so far remained undefeated.

Before it was implemented, trac also had a lot of spambots.

That sounds like a good idea to me.
I could also imagine other measures to make it less attractive for any 
automated account creations, for example with regards to timing:

- Don't allow more than 1 account creation per 15 minutes
   (a real person can wait and try again when told so, and automated sign-ups 
are unable to create many accounts at once)
- State that the e-mail confirmation may take up to an hour and let it take 
that long
   (an automated signup doesn't have the time to wait)
- Require new users to wait 24h before being allowed to push something (or 
create a fork repo)

These things are acceptable for real persons but no spammer likes something 
that needs to be scripted in multiple parts which need to run at different 
times.
Albeit annoying, this is still far better than requiring that people have to 
"apply" in order to be granted access. That's extreme fencing again and might 
even appear as if things have become worse than before (for posting patches to the ML you 
don't need to ask anybody for being granted access).

If it's too difficult to handle it via self-hosting, my preference would go 
back to using GitHub instead.

Literally, all that users have to do if they want to submit a PR is to ask one of the admins that they plan to submit PRs. They can still submit issues and comments. It's better than having to wait for days for an admin to approve you. We can setup a repository that users can make an issue on if they want to submit a PR. Surely, we won't get more than a few users a day registering, so it wouldn't take long to give them access. I think this is a better option than having spammers and increasing the load on admins. Finally, with federation, there's are no restriction. If users have an account on another Forgejo instance, such as codeberg, they can clone and submit PRs to FFmpeg without having to register, and without needing to use agit.

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