Subject: Re: Dealing with corporate email recycling

From: Sean Allred <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2022 10:21:04 -0500

<[email-masked]> writes:
> I have another reluctant suggestion, but it depends on your industry,
> regulations, and other factors. In some sectors, there is a
> requirement to keep only some period of time worth of history. In
> fact, in some settings, keeping user identifying information beyond,
> say 7 years, actually is problematic. Pruning your history may be not
> only an option but required. An alternative is to use filter-branch to
> essentially tokenize the identities of past authors and keep those in
> a electronic vault somewhere. I have customers who are interpreting
> GDPR-like rules just such as situation, where employees gone 7 years
> ago and cannot be retained, by name, in the repos. I am not personally
> happy about that, because my own repo-OCD demands that I know exactly
> who did what until the end of time, but according to them, it actually
> violates the local regulations. I'm sure you have had conversations
> with lawyers, yes? ☹

I don't believe we've involved our legal team here (I'll follow up with
them internally), but that might be a spin-off discussion for folks who
know they're affected.  It would seem that the design of Git makes
purging history on an ongoing basis problematic -- you would always have
at least one unresolvable reference to a parent commit.  If this is a
real requirement from GDPR-like laws, either 'reasonable' VCS metadata
needs to be a specific carve-out in those laws -- but who the heck knows
what is 'reasonable' -- or as a project, Git needs to have an answer to
this situation and an ability to truncate history without otherwise
altering it.

It's also worth noting that even in the last five years, at our scale,
we've definitely run into the email-recycling problem already.

Being based in the U.S. and not having seen pitchforks about this yet,
I'd like to assume for the purpose of this discussion that we're keeping
all our history.

I think if the topic of legal implications of keeping history in
perpetuity is valuable to continue, we should spin it off into a
separate thread.  Personally I'm not seeing what we (Git) could
realistically do about it other than provide recommendations and paths
forward -- which might require considerable development.

--
Sean Allred