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Hector Martin

TIL that some people are playing GitHub race games to make it seem like Linus Torvalds merged their GitHub PR.

Cute trick, but no, Linus doesn't actually ever merge anything via GitHub. Explanation here.

27 June at 6:16 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
5 comments
Stefan Sperling

@marcan Wow, this shouldn't be possible. Is it something GitHub is aware of and going to prevent?

Reminds me of another bug in their platform where one can make trees added to forked repositories appear in the origin repository because all forks use shared repository storage underneath: github.com/github/dmca/tree/41

27 June at 6:22 | Open on bsd.network
Hector Martin

@stsp It's possible by design because the Git protocol has no concept of "who opened a merge request" since merge requests themselves are not part of the protocol. Anyone can fundamentally claim credit for any code *merge* on GitHub by design. What they can't do is claim credit for the code (commit authorship *is* part of the protocol).

The only fix would be for GitHub to stop auto-marking PRs as merged when merge commits are pushed, but that would make things awkward since manual merges would not allow PRs to be marked merged at all. Or I guess they could do some hack where this only works if the PR author has at least one commit authored or committed by them in the merge branch. But that's hard to explain.

@stsp It's possible by design because the Git protocol has no concept of "who opened a merge request" since merge requests themselves are not part of the protocol. Anyone can fundamentally claim credit for any code *merge* on GitHub by design. What they can't do is claim credit for the code (commit authorship *is* part of the protocol).

27 June at 6:31 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Stefan Sperling

I see, thanks for the explanation.

Yeah, it's clear that anyone can mirror anyone else's merge-commits and that this needs to be allowed by the Git protocol. There's an implicit assumption that authenticated users won't push garbage to servers, and in a distributed system this assumption is hard to avoid since such things cannot possibly be verified on every server.

Seems like the best solution would indeed be requiring PRs not merged via the web UI to be closed manually. I can see how Github might be afraid that people would find this too inconvenient. I myself would prefer a solid design over such convenience, though.

I see, thanks for the explanation.

Yeah, it's clear that anyone can mirror anyone else's merge-commits and that this needs to be allowed by the Git protocol. There's an implicit assumption that authenticated users won't push garbage to servers, and in a distributed system this assumption is hard to avoid since such things cannot possibly be verified on every server.

27 June at 6:43 | Open on bsd.network
kayenne

@marcan this is an amazing Stupid Programmer Trick

27 June at 6:23 | Open on social.wxcafe.net
Peter Bindels

@marcan So the bug is Github pretending to be in charge of things it's not in charge of, by making the assumption "if a PR exists for commit hash X and X is in the mainline, then the PR must have been merged"?

27 June at 6:53 | Open on infosec.exchange
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