Re: [PATCH 0/3] Advertise OS version

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 20, 2024, 15:25 UTC
Message-ID: <20240620152521.GB1555496@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <ZnNftSO13KlmFbQ3@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>

On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 10:46:13PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

> We'll want to honour people's decisions to remain a mystery or to work
> around broken server implementations, or just to make it harder to track
> or fingerprint them.

Yep, I agree with everything you said, especially this part.

Show 5 quoted lines

> I also think the documentation should state that for the user-agent and
> os-version fields that they are merely informative, can be changed, and
> MUST NOT be used for access control.  That doesn't mean people will
> honour it, but it does mean that we can and should feel free to break
> implementations that don't comply.

I think Christian's proposed documentation did have something along these lines.

I do kind of wonder if we even need a separate "os-version" field, and if it couldn't simply be plugged into the user-agent string (making it "git/1.2.3 Linux x86_64" or something). But maybe that introduces more hassles with respect to configuring/overriding the two parts separately.

-Peff