On 30.11.2012 21:51, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > Ben Reser <b...@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
