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Re: Obliterate and auditability

From: Karl Fogel <kfogel_at_red-bean.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:55:13 -0400

Branko Čibej <brane_at_xbc.nu> writes:
> kmradke_at_rockwellcollins.com wrote:
>> On a side note, it has always bothered me that changing revision
>> properties leaves no audit history trace... Does this bother
>> anyone else?
>
> Yes. :)

No :-).

Or at least, it doesn't bother me as much as it bothers some people,
though I'd be happy to see audit trails / rewindability for log
messages.

There's a myth going around that our unaudited log messages mean
Subversion doesn't have the "time safe" property. But Subversion is
time-safe. The question with time safety is always "What things are in
scope and what things are out of scope?"

You could implement a repository just like Subversion's, except without
log messages, and instead people could just stick post-it notes to
revisions. Sometimes they might remove a post-it note and replace it
with a new one. We couldn't prevent that -- after all, a revision is a
label, and if people want to write other documents that happen to
*refer* to those labels, well... It's like trying to stop someone from
linking to you on the Web: a URL is just a string other people may use
in their own documents.

All we've done with log messages and other revprops is make a very
convenient way to attach post-it notes to our revisions.

I'm answering a question other than the one you asked, of course. It
might be useful if we started versioning those post-it notes, and I'm
definitely for it. But I do want to dispel the myth that it's related
to time safety (which you didn't bring up), and this seemed as good a
place as any.

-Karl

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Received on 2008-04-22 09:08:02 CEST

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