Welcome to the 102nd edition of Git Rev News, a digest of all things Git. For our goals, the archives, the way we work, and how to contribute or to subscribe, see the Git Rev News page on git.github.io.
This edition covers what happened during the months of July 2023 and August 2023.
Nick, alias Nicholas Johnson, asked on the Git mailing list if it would be possible to implement an integrated feature in Git, perhaps a config option, to obfuscate the committer and author timestamps that are stored in commits when they are created.
Nick is the creator of Git Privacy which is a repository containing instructions in a README.md file that already helps developers obfuscate Git timestamps, and also explains why it can be a good idea to do so.
The instructions suggest setting the GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and
GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables when committing, so that
the timestamps in these variables are recorded instead of the
current date, time and timezone.
Nick thought that using such environment variables or other not fully integrated mechanisms like Git hooks was too cumbersome and asked for ideas or feedback about how to improve the situation.
Junio Hamano, the Git maintainer, replied to Nick, saying that his opinion was that it might not be worth implementing an integrated feature, as using such a feature removed “half the value of keeping your work in [a] source code management system”. Especially it would make it harder to refute possible claims that the source code contained stolen proprietary IP (Intellectual Property).
Nick replied that he conceded it might not be worth it to implement his original suggestion. He said that having Git automatically converting local time to UTC in the timestamps it records could still be useful to avoid leaking the developer’s time zone. He pointed to a Gerrit issue about this.
Junio replied that he still thought it wasn’t worth the effort as there was not enough reason to go against Git’s initial design to store the timezone.
Nick replied to Junio saying that storing the timezone revealed private information about developers without much gain, and that a config option could let users decide about doing this or not.
This led to a separate sub-thread where Nick and Jason Pyeron
started to design a --privacy=option1,option2 with corresponding
config variables to change the timezone, specify a date precision,
etc. brian m. carlson said he would support timezone and timestamp
tweaking options and made some technical suggestions too.
René Scharfe chimed in on the main thread saying that
“timezone and timestamps are personal data, which may only be
collected and processed for a lawful purpose according to the GDPR”,
referring to the European Union’s
General Data Protection Regulation.
So he thought that the user should be able to control if that data
should be stored or not, and it was a usability issue if he could
not easily do that. He also noticed that git commit already has a
--date=<date> option to change the author date and a --signoff
option for adding Signed-off-by: Author Name <author@example.com>
trailers. He concluded by saying “adding config options for
controlling timestamp granularity is hard to say no to”.
Nick replied that he was asking for this feature for moral reasons not for legal ones. He took the example of the I2P project which is a layer on top of Internet to protect people’s activity and location, saying that most developers of the project don’t want their timezones leaked as they are known only under pseudonyms.
Junio replied to René saying that the --date=<date> option had
good reasons to exist. For example, the committer might be relaying
somebody else’s changes, or a system clock might have an issue. He
also thought that the existing two environment variables are the
right place to draw the line, as Git developers shouldn’t be
pretending to be security engineers and invent their own time
obfuscating mechanisms.
In another email, Junio explained in more detail why it’s more
important to be able to tweak the author timestamp than the
committer timestamp. He also repeated that two environment variables
were a good place for other security minded people to build on a
quality “privacy enhancing date command” that could also be used
outside the Git context.
Junio replied to himself saying that a “–useless-time” option, or a
“core.uselesstime” configuration variable to make timestamps only
use UTC and be otherwise nearly meaningless could be OK though, as
they wouldn’t have “privacy” in their name and wouldn’t pretend to be
a quality privacy feature. He laid out how such a feature could
work, and noticed that features like git log --since=... wouldn’t
then be expected to properly work.
Nick agreed that such a feature shouldn’t use “privacy” in its name, and said that Junio’s proposed feature would satisfy the privacy use case he was interested in, and that he didn’t want more than that.
Theodore Ts’o then chimed in to point out that “someone still might be able to figure out information from when a branch gets pushed to a git repo”. He mentioned that for example GitHub, GitHub actions and integration systems could also leak information about when users are active.
Nick replied to Ted saying that protecting privacy had to start somewhere, even if not all the tools were already doing it.
Future will tell if someone will actually implement something along
the lines that have been discussed, and whether it will be a
“privacy enhancing date command” usable outside the Git context,
or an option integrated into Git.
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Calvin Wan and I’m a Software Engineer on the Git Core team at Google.
I also enjoy playing poker, volleyball, and ping pong. I play the World Series of Poker Main Event every year and one of these years I’m hoping to make the final table 😄
What would you name your most important contribution to Git?
I’m hoping my in-flight series for a Git Standard Library will become my most important contribution to Git…at least for now 😄
What are you doing on the Git project these days, and why?
Currently working on getting Git Standard Library merged – to summarize it will serve as the foundation for other libraries in Git to be built off of. When we first embarked on this journey towards libification, we had many reasons for doing so, most of which Emily captured in the initial proposal.
If you could remove something from Git without worrying about backwards compatibility, what would it be?
Old style submodules. Submodule development is already difficult to work on, and having extra bits and pieces in the codebase that exist for the sole purpose of not breaking old style submodules added an extra layer of complexity I wish I didn’t have to reason about.
Do you happen to have any memorable experience w.r.t. contributing to the Git project? If yes, could you share it with us?
Attending Git Merge 2022! I enjoyed meeting the people I had been interacting with on list – putting a face to the name was particularly exciting. I also enjoyed the discussions at the Contributor Summit and the talks that followed.
What is your toolbox for interacting with the mailing list and for development of Git?
I develop using VSCode and send my patches with git format-patch and
git send-email. For patches upstream, I use b4 am + git am to
test locally. When I reply to patches I use a script I modified from
Jonathan Tan to set up the replies for git send-email. For simple
replies and emails, I use Gmail’s plaintext mode.
What is your advice for people who want to start Git development? Where and how should they start?
I think there are plenty of good resources out there that others have probably mentioned before (Pro Git book, MyFirstContribution, git-mentoring list), but the one suggestion I would have is spend less time worrying about getting the right setup and spend more time getting your patches to list!
Various
git for-each-ref,
preserving precious objects from garbage collection via gc.recentObjectsHook,
and other changes.Light reading
.gitignore,
leaving outdated merged-in branches,
using force push in a shared repository,
storing API keys and other secrets in a repository,
and storing large binary files –
cause problems, and how to prevent them
(often how to do it with the help of the Tower Git client).git commit --fixup and git rebase --interactive --autosquash
(before submitting changes).textconv gitattribute
for those files.Easy watching
Git tools and sites
.git files into any other format.
Written in Rust.
This edition of Git Rev News was curated by Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>, Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>, Markus Jansen <mja@jansen-preisler.de> and Kaartic Sivaraam <kaartic.sivaraam@gmail.com> with help from Calvin Wan and Štěpán Němec.