Ian Jackson <[email protected]> writes: > Simon McVittie writes ("Re: Include git commit id and git tree id in > *.changes files when uploading?"): >> On Wed, 07 Jan 2026 at 15:38:31 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: >> >We do not impose any such sanctions. >> >> Who is "we" here? Do you speak on behalf of the dgit team, or the DFSG >> team, or project-wide consensus? > > On behalf of the dgit team, I can say that it is our policy that this > is allowed. > > As for Debian as a whole: I am not aware of anyone in authority ever > having tried to get people to launder files from git history, merely > because they didn't meet (or hadn't been audited against) our usual > DFSG requirements. I had this conversation with various people at the > start of the dgit project. The consensus seemed to be that that ship > had already sailed long ago, even in 2013, for Alioth (which is where > dgit-repos started out). > > That will have to do, I'm afraid. You're not likely to get an > official statement for all same kind of reasons as bureaucrats (eg > corporate laywers) don't like to say "yes".
I think this will be revisited in discussion again and again, because it is not a simple technical matter with a simple solution, but there is one approach that I didn't see suggested how to deal with this: Instead of rewriting git history: prune it. That is, get upstream to remove offensive non-DFSG material from their git project in the first place, and then start an Debian upstream-code branch from that commit. Yes, older branches will still contain non-DFSG content, but at least the "modern" branch that we use for building will not contain non-DFSG content, even in the git history. I think this is an acceptable and practical approach that will meet even the most stringent reviews from anyone who is concerned about having non-DFSG content in a git branch. This approach can also be adopted to deal with really large upstream git projects. As for what to do with old branches, it doesn't really matter. There are fewer reasonable arguments for not preserving factual history. (Although snapshot.debian.org's removal of some old files may be reasonable, or it may not..) /Simon
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