git/list[1] front-page[2] threads[3] people[4] search[5] about
 

Re: Does content provenance matter?

From
KDKelly Dean <kellydeanch@yahoo.com>
Date
May 7, 2012, 23:13 UTC
Message-ID
<1336432417.36394.YahooMailClassic@web121504.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
In-Reply-To
<CAJsNXT=26u-PPNe9_LFoC1tAKpWJRWfBNNKzQB5Ya3X0n4K_eg@mail.gmail.com>
--- On Mon, 5/7/12, PJ Weisberg <pj@irregularexpressions.net> wrote:
> But there could be any number of unrelated commits newer than "Bar"
> but older than "Revert Bar" on other branches.  Even if you could
> trust the timestamps to be accurate (you can't), you still can't
> determine a commit's parent unambiguously.

Therefore, provenance does matter, and it must be explicitly recorded because it can't necessarily be correctly and fully deduced from content alone. And git does record inter-commit provenance. However, git doesn't record intra-commit provenance, as I mentioned in my original message. My question is: why this discrepancy? Either provenance matters, or it doesn't; why record it in one case but not the other?

Previous: PJ WeisbergNext: Andrew Ardill
Message 5 of 10 in “Does content provenance matter?”
  1. Kelly DeanMay 5, 2012
  2. Thomas RastMay 7, 2012
  3. Kelly DeanMay 7, 2012
  4. PJ WeisbergMay 7, 2012
  5. Kelly DeanMay 7, 2012
  6. Andrew ArdillMay 8, 2012
  7. Philip OakleyMay 8, 2012
  8. Junio C HamanoMay 8, 2012
  9. Junio C HamanoMay 8, 2012
  10. Jakub NarebskiMay 7, 2012

Read the whole thread, see it on lore, or plain text.

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.