Comment by da_chicken
2 days ago
> To me it's not clear what the problem is that would require a redesign.
The interface is still bad. Teaching people to use git is still obnoxious because it's arcane. It's like 1e AD&D. It does everything it might need to, but it feels like every aspect of it is bespoke.
It's also relatively difficult to make certain corrections. Did you ever accidentally commit something that contains a secret that can't be in the repository? Well, you might want to throw that entire repository away and restore it from a backup before the offending commit because it's so difficult to fix and guarantee that it's not hiding in there somewhere and while also not breaking something else.
It's also taken over 10 years to address the SHA-1 limitation, and it's still not complete. It's a little astonishing that it was written so focused on SHA-1 never being a problem that it's taken this long to keep the same basic design and just allow a different hashing algorithm.
> Well, you might want to throw that entire repository away and restore it from a backup before the offending commit because it's so difficult to fix and guarantee that it's not hiding in there somewhere and while also not breaking something else.
I'm not a git expert but I cant image that's true
Of course is not true - look into git filter branch. I had to use it once when a developer checked in a whole bunch of binaries and created a PR which ended being merged. I had to rewrite the history and delete the files from history - just deleting the files would not suffice because the file were in git history and we’re taking too m&ch space.
It’s not you just need to force push or generate a new key…
Perhaps proving the point here. That's not enough to eliminate the secret, the dangling commit will persist. Though this might be a nitpick, it's rather hard to get it from the remote without knowing the SHA.
> generate a new key
Is absolutely the right answer. If you pushed a key, you should treat it as already compromised and rotate it.
You also need to clear the caches of the remote
Yeah it doesn't seem hard to rewrite the commit history
The interface can be independent of the implementation. Under the hood git does everything you need. If learning to use it at a low level isnt appealing, then you can put an interface on top which is more ergonomic.
I'm a huge fan of lazygit
> Under the hood git does everything you need
No it doesn't. Git is buggy. It also doesn't work for anything that's not a text file. It is unbelievably slow.
> Did you ever accidentally commit something that contains a secret that can't be in the repository?
What do I need to do on top of a git force push, and some well documented remote reflog/gc cleanup, which I can’t find with a single search/LLM request? Are we there, where we don’t have enough developers who can do this without feeling it as a burden? Or are we there where this level of basic logic is not needed to implement anything production ready?
> What do I need to do on top of a git force push, and some well documented remote reflog/gc cleanup, which I can’t find with a single search/LLM request?
This is a self-defeating argument. You're essentially saying we shouldn't improve something because it can be done with a handful of commands (you already know btw) and prompting an LLM.
> Are we there, where we don’t have enough developers who can do this without feeling it as a burden?
The no true scotman.
> Or are we there where this level of basic logic is not needed to implement anything production ready?
Not sure how this fits in with the rest honestly.
It was never about whether it was possible. It was about how it's being done. Juniors (and even seniors) accidentally check in secrets. Arguing that there shouldn't be a simpler way to remove an enormous security flaw feels a bit disingenuous.
No, I’m saying that you can do this without replacing git. You can make it simpler even without replacing git. Aka you just did a strawman, if you are really into these. Also you answered to me in an authoritative way, when even according to you, you don’t understand my comment. You can figure out a logical fallacy name for this. And also of course a nice fallacy fallacy.
Btw, I’m also saying that who cannot find how it can be solved right now with git, those shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a repo with write permission, no matter whether you use git or not. At least until now, this level of minimal logical skill was a requirement to be able to code. And btw regardless the tool, the flow will be the exact same: ask a search engine or ml model, and run those. The flow is like this for decades at this point. So those minimal logical skills will be needed anyway.
The problem mainly is that when they don’t even know that they shouldn’t push secrets. You won’t be able to help this either any tooling. At least not on git level.
1 reply →
git rebase -i <one commit before your mistake> git push origin mainline -f
git log --all --reflog -- path/to/secret-file
Git filter rule
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