Well, you can... just not with SVN...

Posted Apr 8, 2010 16:09 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Well, you can... just not with SVN... by foom
Parent article: On projects and their goals

A "poison pill" that the poisonee has to swallow willingly, in full knowledge what it is, is kind of pointless for forcing the deletion of certain unwellcome contents... plus won't afect any copies floating around.

Yes, it would be excellent if you could remotely destroy all traces of some secret after the cat is out of the bag... but that just can't be done. Get over it.

to post comments

Well, you can... just not with SVN...

Posted Apr 8, 2010 21:30 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

I see you don't understand the use case. That does not mean it's not real.

What I'm talking about is within a company, where there is some amount of central control. A
poison pill that the poisonee has to agree to is *not* pointless, if it is processed automatically
and allows the user to not care that it happened. The agreement would happen ahead-of-time,
when the clients are setup to trust the central repository.

Of course it's not possible to (remotely or otherwise) destroy all traces of information. Your
mistake is jumping from that true statement to the suggestion that it's pointless to do anything
at all. And that's simply not a supportable jump. Yes, an Evil User could intentionally save a copy
and Do Evil, but in a corporate environment where you hope you can trust everybody, it's often
quite sufficient to simply avoid explicitly tempting people to do something bad.

At the *very least*, I need to stop distributing the data (that is: remove it from the central
repository). And just that alone will cause significant user pain if everyone's using git. Everyone's
branches and working copies need manual intervention to clean up. Not a fun state to be in.
Contrast with SVN, which implicitly trusts the central repository, and just goes with the flow...