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Re: Obliterate and auditability

From: <kmradke_at_rockwellcollins.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:12:11 -0500

Karl Fogel <kfogel_at_red-bean.com> wrote on 04/21/2008 10:55:13 AM:
> 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?"

So you basically are saying the repo is "time safe" with respect to
file contents, which is a valid point. Revprops typically don't
affect the contents, they are just information. (And by default
revprop mods are "off", so it is by user/admin choice they can
be modified)

> 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.

I'm fairly happy with the current functionality. It "bothers" me
mainly because I sometimes forget when/why some values were changed,
so having a history/audit log would be helpful. In fact, I hadn't
even though about "time safety"...

And in reality, it would be trivial to write a post-revprop-change
hook to append revprop change history to a file I could reference later.
(One wonders why I hadn't thought of this sooner...)

Kevin R.

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Received on 2008-04-22 09:25:05 CEST

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