Tuesday, February 20, 2018

GitHub Shouldn’t Allow Username Reuse

Jesse Donat (via Hacker News):

Usernames, once deleted, should never be allowed to be valid again. Many sites including Google do it this way.

Allowing username reuse completely breaks any trust that what I pull is what it claims to be.

[…]

I think another good option would be Github offering permalinks to repos, such that if they were deleted and recreated the pathing would change.

It affects not only package managers and programs and software, but humans. Humans navigating Github. I have no way to tell while navigating the site if a project is the original or a charade. That is a problem.

Previously: Trusting SDKs.

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This is more a problem with the decentralized nature of git than with GitHub.
Whatever the project, it is always very hard to know if you are on the officially supported trunk or on a fork.
It is worse when the official project is dead. There is absolutely no way to know who has taken over it and maintains it.

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