On 30.11.2012 21:51, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Ben Reser <ben_at_reser.org>:
>> But again, if you want svn:author to be set to some value a user sets
>> locally and that has doesn't necessarily have anything to do with
>> their authentication to the server, you can't do that with username
>> configuration. Since there is absolutely no guarantee that username
>> will even be sent to the server.
> Alas. I hear you reporting that identity-for-attribution and
> identity-for-authentication are not cleanly enough separated for the
> user to be able to reliably set the latter to a chosen Internet-scoped ID.
>
> Subversion is still off Federation's list, then. This may not matter
> in itself, as Federation only exists as design ideas at present. But
> I strongly believe future forges are going to go in the direction I'm
> pointing, even if it doesn't happen to be me leading the way. The wins
> from being able to marshal and cross-load project states are just too
> large to be ignored much longer. And Subversion as it is now won't
> be ready to play in that world.
>
> I'm not sure what the entire right design fix for Subversion is here, but
> I *am* sure you guys should be paying attention to this now so you can have
> the fix ready and deployed by the time forge evolution makes it urgent, which
> I would say will be on the close order of three years out. Sooner, if I
> actually get to pay concentrated attention to the problem.
>
> So think: What would it take to divorce identity-for-attribution from
> identity-for-authentication, making the former user-settable the way
> DVCSes do? The challenge, of course, is doing it upward-compatibly.
>
> I apologize for not being able to make any concrete suggestions here;
> outside of the dumpfile format I don't know your code and protocols
> well enough.
The obvious easy answer is to introduce a new reserved property name for
attribution, without changing the semantics of svn:author.
In retrospect it's unfortunate we didn't call that svn:committer-id or
some such, but there you have it.
-- Brane
--
Branko Čibej
Director of Subversion | WANdisco | www.wandisco.com
Received on 2012-11-30 21:55:59 CET