bug#74413: [PATCH] Allow to store and read repository information of VCS builds

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 18:48:31 -0500
> Cc: luangruo@yahoo.com, 74413@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > The branch name could be private.
> >
> > Stefan, WDYT about this feature suggestion?
> 
> The privacy risk here is that if a user is building their own private
> branch, announcing the sha or branch name to the world can be used to
> uniquely identify that user.  It would be a serious privacy issue if we,
> for example, included that information in User-Agent headers sent by EWW
> or other kinds of network traffic.  AFAIK, we don't do that.
> 
> IIUC, we use this information only when submitting bug reports.  I think
> this is harmless, if we assume privacy threat models where it can also
> be considered safe to report bugs.  The few users that have more strict
> privacy requirements, and are eager to report bugs, will just have to
> think about this detail themselves; it's a rather specialized use case.

AFAIU, the intent is to use this for more than just bug reporting.

> I don't fully understand how you can have a situation where you can get
> this information in the Makefile, but you can't also get it when dumping
> using `emacs-repository-get-version` and `emacs-repository-get-branch`
> (lisp/loadup.el:474).  Could you please elaborate on this?

Yes, I still don't understand the utility of this feature, since it
needs Git for producing the information in the file.