MSavoritias <em...@msavoritias.me> writes:
On 3/17/24 13:53, paul wrote:
Hi all ,
thank you MSavoritias for bringing up points that many of us
share. It's clearly a tradeoff what to do about the past. For
the
future, as Christpher already stated, we need a serious
solution
that we can uphold as a free software project that does not
alienate
users or contributors.
My opinion is that names are just wrong to be included, not
only
because of deadnames, but in general having a database with a
column
first_name and a column second_name is something only a 35 yrs
old
white cis boy could have thought was a good idea to model the
spectrum of names humans use all over the world:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240317114846/https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
If we'd really need to identify contributors, and obviously
Guix
doesn't, we could use an UUID/machine readable identifier which
can
then be mapped to a displayed name. I believe git can already
be
configured to do so.
giacomo
The uuid sounds like a very interesting solution indeed.
I wonder how easy it could be to add it to git.
This also seems like interesting territory to explore. The
concerns raised around rewriting history have valid points; I
think it’s impractical to rewrite history any time a change needs
to happen, as that would be an ongoing source of disruption. But
rewriting history *once*, to switch to a more general mechanism,
seems like a reasonable trade to me. This also presents an
opportunity: we could combine this with a default branch switch
from master to main. A news entry left as the final commit in
master could inform people of whatever steps may be needed to
update (if that can’t be automated), and the main branch would
contain the rewritten history.
It’s certainly not a perfect solution, but it seems pragmatic.
— Ian
