Origins of the D Programming Language

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 04:10:49PM -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 11/30/2018 3:55 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> > > Github is such an indispensable tool.
> > 
> > Lemme slightly correct you here: it is git that tracks this stuff
> > and distributes the history to several third parties who can
> > corroborate you.
> > 
> > Github, of course, helps coordinate with those other people, and
> > their brand name surely helps in recognition, but I don't wanna give
> > it too much credit because I do think it is important that we
> > remember that it can be replaced... and probably will replace them
> > someday. (They would have recently gone under if not bailed out by
> > Microsoft!) Specific companies come and go, but the underlying
> > methodology outlives that.
> 
> I mentioned Github instead of just git because being a third party I
> think it would be very difficult to fake a Github provenance, while a
> git repository stored on your own disk would be fake-able.
[...]

Github provenance is only reliable if someone has forked your repository
before the date of contention, because you can `git push --force` to
rewrite history, if you were so inclined. I know for sure this works on
topic branches; don't know if they block the master branch (unlikely).

Well, a 3rd party forking your repo still doesn't guarantee provenance,
because one might be accused of corroborating to rewrite history over
multiple forks.  But it's so much harder (and tedious) to pull off (3rd
parties are unlikely to cooperate on such an obvious subversion attempt,
and on top of that they will REALLY HATE you for breaking their git
pulls), so I guess it could be "reliable enough".  And with the number
of forks the various D-related repos have, it's pretty much proven that
there's no funny business going on, if this should ever become a point
of doubt.


T

-- 
I am not young enough to know everything. -- Oscar Wilde