[TriEmbed] GitHub heads up: password logins go away August 13th

Fri Jan 29 01:27:59 CST 2021

Carl, (or anyone else)

Here i go. I'm going to risk sounding like a wild eyed crazy guy. But if I
can get good suggestions, it's worth it. :-)

Question 1:

How is a central git repo dramatically ifferent from a local repo?

I'm guessing a lot has happened in the world of git that I've been
priveledged to ignore, while using git as a simple "client".

What I remember is that i was using bitkeeper for one of the repositories
my development group had inherited during an acquisition at the time that
linus torvolds and the owner of bitkeeper decided to separate linux from
bitkeeper. Are the time it seemed acrimonious although to hear it now it
was something that they mutually agreed to.

So I started using git when it was still just a set of quick scripts that
linus "had thrown together over the weekend". It clearly inherited a lot of
good it worked from bitkeeper. There are some differences because bitkeeper
was for profit and git was to support distributed opensource development.

At that time one of the explicit goals of git was to ensure that no one
repo or repo manager could ever "own" the source history of a project. The
goal was that if a repo was closed, or locked or "taken over" - then any
other repo could become the central repository as long as all the "clients"
(i.e. local repository holders) decided to reconfigure their "parent" to
that alternate repo. at the time it seemed (in the press) that linus was
unhappy with the idea that the holder of a singal repo could hold the
history of the Linux change control hostage to a personal agenda. But
saying that's what the owner of bitkeeper did. It's just that what he
wanted to do made it clear that it was a possibility that someone might
someday do that.

And my experience with git is that i can point at pretty much any repo as
the upstream source, whether it's one on the same hard drive, one on
another computer in my office, or one hosted on the cloud.

What all am I missing about a central server? I don't doubt that I'm
missing things, i just don't know what? I can imagine the "central server"
should be backed up, but every time it's fully cloned that happens. And if
there are other records, then a standard disk backup would do. I can
imagine that if it gets enough traffic, there might be some questions of
scale, (load balancing, atomicity, etc) but I'm not to talking about
thousands of users but rather 10s or at most a couple of hundred occasional
users.

What am I missing?

Question 2:
What horrible problems do you see happening with a single account for all
of many users? How would you address it? (Approach not staffing) Keep in
mind you are addressing a small nonprofit with a very limited budget, a
need to give almost every user admin (or some equivalent to sudo) so they
can install software and experiment and even ruin an OS install and then
learn to rebuild it, and that pretty much all the computers are 5 or more
years out of date and heterogenous makes and models because all are donated
as cast offs.

Also, it is easier to wipe them and start over, than to worry about keeping
them clean, and that we have had very few problems with wild "sw virus
plagues" over the last decade, because people use these computers to get
things done, not to browser random websites.

There is not disk space on each laptop for a personal account for every
member of the organization. It is not reasonable to dedicate specific
computers to specific people. We might be able to set up active directory
(or the like) and have people use an account and home directory) on a
server, but then we need a reliable and accessible server. However, these
computers often leave the site to be used for outreach, often while
training brand new people who would not yet be in the directory and in
locations where  the computer would not be able to reach the directory
server. (Often used when wifi or ethernet not available.)

So I'm curious - what do you think will go wrong and how would you solve
it? I'd love a creative effective approach that addresses our odd
requirement set. The requirements are a result of working really really
hard to eliminate perceived obstacles to trying  something technical. Our
efforts are aimed at getting people who aren't even sure they should
consider that they might someday become technical to try something that is
far outside their comfort zone. So each delay of access, each complexity of
access, each extra step adds to the likelihood that the people we are
addressing will decide that their first impression was correct - tech is
not for them. We want to avoid that.

So we leave things as wide open as we can.

So again - if you have creative solutions that will help us make this more
accessible, and easier to manage - I'd really love to hear what you
suggest. Our requirements are so different from an office, or a school, or
a government, or even the part of our organization that runs it as a
business that most ideas I've heard are cures worse than the problem in
terms of lowerng perceived barriers. Just saying "people should get over it
and do it right", which I've heard a lot - well we can do that, but a lot
of people with a lot of potential will just walk away - their self story
will be "tech is too hard" before they find out how much they can love it,
and well they can learn it.

Rob.

On Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 12:36 PM Carl Nobile <carl.nobile at gmail.com> wrote:

> Robert,
>
> I hate to say this but everybody working with the same account is asking
> for trouble.
> The reason why I'm the only one to respond, at least with respond all, is
> because there is no better solution but to have separate accounts.
> I understand that you have no admin to seemingly solve the issue for you,
> but that's the issue to solve not to get around it by trying to solve the
> myriad of problems having only one account will cause.
>
> If you really can't solve the single account problem then yes definitely
> set up a local git repo, but that will take the talents of somebody that
> really knows how git works. A central git repo is NOT set up like the one
> you have locally in your working environment, it may need that elusive
> admin for setting up.
>
> ~Carl
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 5:55 PM Robert Mackie <rob at mackies.org> wrote:
>
>> Hey Folks,
>>
>> Could use some insights from you.  My normal case - on a computer I own,
>> or work at regularly and am the only user of, or on an account i own and am
>> the only user of (home or work), it seems like tokens won't be a problem.
>> In fact, they may make things even easier, day-to-day.
>>
>> I have 2 special cases - curious if you have any suggestions.
>>
>> *Case 1)* I coach an FRC team. Everyone on the team uses shared laptops
>> with shared login. We don't have an IT staff to keep a login on each
>> machine for each member of the team on each laptop or computer. So any
>> suggestion that requires doing that isn't worth putting out there.  With
>> passwords it was easy. Anyone could clone a repo, do work, push the work,
>> and delete the repo - all they needed was their password - oh another
>> aside, some of the students aren't at all sure they even want to learn to
>> code so we want to keep the obstacles level as low as possible. requiring
>> lots of expertise to access the code isn't really useful. Many of them have
>> never used a command line, and the interest in doing so is still far in
>> their future.
>>
>> So with a token on shared machines and shared accounts -* one solution*
>> - everyone uses the same token and the same accounts. No one has a clue who
>> put what code in the repo because the push always comes from that account.
>> Any better solutions?
>>
>> *Case 2)* For me 0 I often find that I am in a situation where I'm on a
>> machine that is not "my own machine" and may be on an account that is "not
>> my account". Having non-confidential projects where they can be pulled in
>> quickly is handy. I have open repos on github where confidentiality isn't
>> an issue and can just clone a repo, so some work and push the work, and
>> delete the local repo. if i forget to delete the local repo - no harm to me
>> - they don't have my password, and the harm to them is just the need to
>> delete a directory full of junk (whoever "them" is)  and if they do push
>> some junk to my repo, given the repo IS version control - it would be
>> generally pretty easy to undo the mess unless they were very nefarious.
>>
>> What is the easiest way to make a "token" portable (usb thumb?) and make
>> sure it is never left behind on a machine that I don't control? It feels
>> like losing control of the token is a bad thing.
>>
>> *Parting note:*
>> I have to admit that I haven't taken the time to look and see if there
>> are easy solutions. I'm hoping to get a free ride here on someone else's
>> brilliance. So feel free to tell me my cases are "too special" and go fish
>> on my own. :-) But if you have any suggestions, I'm interested.
>>
>> Rob.
>> PS: I've seriously thought about just setting up a non github git repo in
>> the cloud to solve some of these problems, but there are downsides to that
>> as well. There is value to getting these students on github and aware of
>> how all of that works. and Github has some nice features beyond simple git,
>> and is publicly findable. (and someone else maintains it)
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 11:53 AM Carl Nobile via TriEmbed <
>> triembed at triembed.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Sure,
>>>
>>> I already described in one of my previous tutorials how to actually get
>>> the token, but not how to use it for normal SSH access.
>>>
>>> ~Carl
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 11:45 AM Pete Soper via TriEmbed <
>>> triembed at triembed.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Been a long time since I hooked up for working with a GitHub repo (the
>>>> day MS bought them) and I just got a message saying it's time to get
>>>> with the the token, SSH thing.
>>>>
>>>> If anybody's interested I could take notes about how to make this
>>>> transition, but it will be Linux-centric.
>>>>
>>>> -Pete
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Carl J. Nobile (Software Engineer)
>>> carl.nobile at gmail.com
>>>
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>
> --
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Carl J. Nobile (Software Engineer)
> carl.nobile at gmail.com
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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