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

On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 04:29:35PM -0800, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 04:10:49PM -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> > 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).
[...]

Also, this assumes that the original commits weren't fudged to begin with, before pushing to Github.  After all, git *does* let you override the date(s) stored in each commit.  And one could set the hardware clock to a different time, etc..

So it's not a 100% guarantee by any means, but there's a sliding scale of increasing unlikelihood that, past a certain point, would just have to be taken on faith barring circumstantial evidence that indicate otherwise.


T

-- 
One reason that few people are aware there are programs running the internet is that they never crash in any significant way: the free software underlying the internet is reliable to the point of invisibility. -- Glyn Moody, from the article "Giving it all away"

On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 02:34:58PM -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Over the past few months, Walter, Mike, and myself have been working on a draft submission for the HOPL 2020 conference (History of Programming Languages).
> 
> The submission proceeds in several stages. Currently we've been through one round of preliminary review. Here is the current draft:
> 
> http://erdani.com/hopl2020-draft.pdf
> 
> We'd appreciate feedback and additional historical details.
[...]

Lines 1049-1050: I wasn't there at the time, so this may be inaccurate, but I clearly remember someone mentioning that Tango has been ported to D2 and is quite usable, at least as of a few years ago.  But I haven't tried it myself, so I can't for sure whether this is actually the case. But it's worth checking so that the HOPL document is factually accurate.


T

-- 
Не дорог подарок, дорога любовь.

On 11/30/2018 4:29 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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.

I've wanted to create a Github history out of 35 years of random backups of my compiler, but never have gotten around to it.

On 11/30/2018 4:42 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> So it's not a 100% guarantee by any means, but there's a sliding scale
> of increasing unlikelihood that, past a certain point, would just have
> to be taken on faith barring circumstantial evidence that indicate
> otherwise.

That's right. And once people start forking a repository, it becomes nearly impossible.

I also bet that Github themselves have backups going back years, so they could produce evidence if the provenance has been tampered with.

All in all, it's infinitely better than "I have a copy from 1992 on this floppy disk".

On Friday, 30 November 2018 at 19:34:58 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Over the past few months, Walter, Mike, and myself have been working on a draft submission for the HOPL 2020 conference (History of Programming Languages).
>
> The submission proceeds in several stages. Currently we've been through one round of preliminary review. Here is the current draft:
>
> http://erdani.com/hopl2020-draft.pdf
>
> We'd appreciate feedback and additional historical details.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrei (on behalf of Walter and Mike as well)

Might as well, D isn't going anywhere(and hence will be left behind). That is what happens when you fail to please your user base and build enough tooling to make it useful to the population at large.

On Saturday, 1 December 2018 at 01:00:00 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 02:34:58PM -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> [...]
> [...]
>
> Lines 1049-1050: I wasn't there at the time, so this may be inaccurate, but I clearly remember someone mentioning that Tango has been ported to D2 and is quite usable, at least as of a few years ago.  But I haven't tried it myself, so I can't for sure whether this is actually the case. But it's worth checking so that the HOPL document is factually accurate.
>
>
> T

I'm pretty sure thats ocean, or at least ocean is descended from Tango

https://github.com/sociomantic-tsunami/ocean/

On Fri, 30 Nov 2018 17:00:00 -0800, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Lines 1049-1050: I wasn't there at the time, so this may be inaccurate, but I clearly remember someone mentioning that Tango has been ported to D2 and is quite usable, at least as of a few years ago.  But I haven't tried it myself, so I can't for sure whether this is actually the case. But it's worth checking so that the HOPL document is factually accurate.

It's updated to roughly 2.068, I think, and doesn't really compile beyond that.

I tried to update it to the most recent DMD, but that was painful. If I try in the future, I'll probably go one major release at a time.

On Saturday, 1 December 2018 at 01:13:14 UTC, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
> I'm pretty sure thats ocean, or at least ocean is descended from Tango
>
> https://github.com/sociomantic-tsunami/ocean/

Ahh, right there in the readme.

> Ocean began life as an extension of Tango, some elements of which were eventually merged into Ocean.

On Sat, Dec 01, 2018 at 01:14:58AM +0000, Neia Neutuladh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Nov 2018 17:00:00 -0800, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > Lines 1049-1050: I wasn't there at the time, so this may be inaccurate, but I clearly remember someone mentioning that Tango has been ported to D2 and is quite usable, at least as of a few years ago.  But I haven't tried it myself, so I can't for sure whether this is actually the case.  But it's worth checking so that the HOPL document is factually accurate.
> 
> It's updated to roughly 2.068, I think, and doesn't really compile beyond that.
> 
> I tried to update it to the most recent DMD, but that was painful. If I try in the future, I'll probably go one major release at a time.

So I'm guessing that other than Sociomantic(?), there aren't any other major codebases out there that use Tango?


T

-- 
My program has no bugs! Only undocumented features...