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Re: Editing author names in RCS files


From: Mark D. Baushke
Subject: Re: Editing author names in RCS files
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 00:38:10 -0800

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Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>Mark Baushke wrote:
>>     There is also a case to be made that being
>>     able to trivially alter the author field
>>     reduces the ability to understand who has
>>     really committed a given change to the
>>     source repository.
> 
> I can't understand what social scenario you're
> worried about. If you explain it clearly, we
> could maybe see whether it is likely enough to
> be a real concern, and whether omitting this
> feature would really help.

It is primarily a question of leaving an audit
trail of how a particular change may have been
made to the repository. In general, revisionist 
modifications of the delta records can violate
the principle of least astonishment for folks
who think that cvs actually keeps track of who
made a change to a repository.

If there is a desire by the CVS user community to
add a feature to modify the author field of one
or all deltas in a given file, I would hope that
only the repository maintainer would be allowed
to perform that particular write operation.

Anyone with physical access to the repository can
probably still modify it. However, being able to
restrict the number of remote users who could try
to modify delta records arbitrarily seems to be
prudent to me.

        -- Mark
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