How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to GitHub

Re:How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to Gi... by renewiltord on Monday November 02, 2020 @06:38PM (#24974755)

Github complies with the DMCA, recently famously through the DMCA takedown of youtube-dl. The writer, Joey Hess (a relatively well-known OSS programmer, moreutils, for instance), is choosing to interpret this as their banning any repo that hosts the commit hash for youtube-dl (which they banned).

So he is jokingly showing you a way to create a Github poison pill. The joke is that if you include this 'illegal' hash you subject the repo to being DMCA'd out (not really, but it's sort of an 'imagine if'). Which means his repo is now unpublishable on Github (for long anyway).

It's kind of hacker humour in the sort of vein that you'd expect from an old-schooler like him. You sort of have to get the joke to get the joke.

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Re:How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to Gi... by Wowfunhappy on Monday November 02, 2020 @07:30PM (#24975068)

I'd find the joke funny if it actually worked.

Since as far as I can tell, Github isn't actually banning specific hashes (because they care about the content, not the hashes), and there's no sign that they're going to do so in the future, I can't say I understand the humor...

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Re:How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to Gi... by geofft on Monday November 02, 2020 @09:03PM (#24975648)

That was my initial reaction too, but thinking about it, it's potentially (probably not, but potentially) a violation of the ToS even if it's not automatically banned.

So, the hacker humor point is that you have a "poison" repo which, if you push it to GitHub, might get your account deleted in the future. You have no guarantee that it won't, for sure.

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Re:How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to Gi... by DarkWiiPlayer on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:54AM (#24977420)

The way I read it, it seems to claim that github will just "insert" a known object with that hash into the new repository when it's pushed, though I'm somewhat confused as to how this would work, or how the submodule trick even adds the hash to the commit log in the first place.

EDIT: I read the article again and couldn't find any of that, so I must have read that in a comment here on HN instead.

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Re:How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to Gi... by vSanjo on Monday November 02, 2020 @11:59PM (#24976474)

That was a very well-written comment, thank you. Hit the dopamine and gave me a smile for your explanation.

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Re:How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to Gi... by syshum on Monday November 02, 2020 @06:47PM (#24974824)

is it a joke though.....

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Re:How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to Gi... by o-__-o on Monday November 02, 2020 @06:51PM (#24974847)

..... yes

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