Subject: RE: [PATCH 0/3] Advertise OS version

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2024 11:34:28 -0500

On December 9, 2024 11:15 AM, Usman Akinyemi wrote:
>Thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion. I am Usman Akinyemi,
>one of the two selected Outreachy interns. I have been selected to work on the
>project “Finish adding an 'os-version'
>capability to Git protocol v2,” which involves implementing the features discussed in
>this thread.
>
>You can find the full discussion about my proposal for this project
>here: https://public-inbox.org/git/CAPSxiM_rvt-tkQjHYmYNv-
>Wyr0=X4+123dt=[email-masked]/
>
>In summary, this is an outline of my proposal and what I plan to implement, which
>has been influenced by the discussion in this thread:
>
>- Send only the OS name by default while allowing a knob (custom
>configuration) to specify other information (e.g., version details) and disable
>sending OS names and any other information entirely.
>
>After discussing with my mentor, @Christian, we think that adding this as a new
>capability (os-version) is a better option compared to appending it to the user-
>agent. This ensures that we do not disrupt people's scripts that collect statistics
>from the user-agent or perform other actions.
>
>Intentions of implementing this project:
>- For statistical purposes.
>- Most importantly, for security and debugging purposes. This will allow servers to
>instruct users to upgrade or perform specific debugging actions when necessary.
>
>For example:-
>A server seeing that a client is using an old Git version that has security issues on
>one platform, like MacOS, could check if the user is indeed running MacOS before
>sending it a message to upgrade.
>
>Also a server seeing a client that could benefit from an upgrade, for example for
>performance reasons, could better customize the message it sends to the client to
>nudge it to upgrade. If the client is on Windows for example the server could send it
>a link to https://gitforwindows.org/ as part of the message.
>
>Please, if anyone has any suggestion or addition or concerns that might, kindly add.
>Thank you very much.

Is this build-time or runtime? If run-time, please make sure the code is portable or provides
hooks so that non-linux systems can contribute content.

Thanks,
Randall

--
Brief whoami: NonStop&UNIX developer since approximately
UNIX(421664400)
NonStop(211288444200000000)
-- In real life, I talk too much.