[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Experiment: enable github pull requests

[Timo Rothenpieler]

On 13.02.2025 01:40, Soft Works wrote:
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel-bounces at ffmpeg.org> On Behalf Of
>> Romain Beauxis
>> Sent: Donnerstag, 13. Februar 2025 01:25
>> To: FFmpeg development discussions and patches <ffmpeg-
>> devel at ffmpeg.org>
>> Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Experiment: enable github pull requests
>>
>> Le mer. 12 févr. 2025 à 18:17, Soft Works
>> <softworkz-at-hotmail.com at ffmpeg.org> a écrit :
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel-bounces at ffmpeg.org> On Behalf Of
>> Timo
>>>> Rothenpieler
>>>> Sent: Donnerstag, 13. Februar 2025 00:34
>>>> To: ffmpeg-devel at ffmpeg.org
>>>> Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Experiment: enable github pull requests
>>>>
>>>> On 13.02.2025 00:07, Soft Works wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>> From: ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel-bounces at ffmpeg.org> On Behalf Of
>>>> Timo
>>>>>> Rothenpieler
>>>>>> Sent: Mittwoch, 12. Februar 2025 22:33
>>>>>> To: ffmpeg-devel at ffmpeg.org
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Experiment: enable github pull
>> requests
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 12.02.2025 22:22, Stephen Hutchinson wrote:
>>>>>>> Are all accounts restricted to owning a maximum of 0 repositories by
>>>>>>> default, or is it set to 0 only for those that sign up through one of
>>>>>>> the external logins?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It's set to 0 by default, to avoid spammers uploading junk, or just
>>>>>> people (ab)using it for non-ffmpeg things.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> You can open issues and comment on existing PRs.
>>>>>> And also create PRs using the AGit workflow:
>>>>>> https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/agit-support/
>>>>>
>>>>> For those who are too lazy to look it up:
>>>>>
>>>>> The "Agit workflow" requires you to use non-standard Git "push-
>> options"
>>>>> (either -o or --push-options):
>>>>>
>>>>> git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master -o topic="topic-branch" \
>>>>>     -o title="Title of the PR" \
>>>>>     -o description="# The PR Description
>>>>> This can be **any** markdown content.\n
>>>>> - [x] Ok"
>>>>>
>>>>> This means essentially that our attempt to move away from the e-mail-
>> based
>>>> submission procedure to something easy and user-friendly, would end up
>> in
>>>> replacing the current rarely-known mechanism with another even more
>> rare
>>>> and obscure procedure which would (again) force everybody to use the Git
>>>> command line because it's (again) not supported by any tooling except Git
>> CLI.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm afraid, but from my point of view, this doesn't match the objective.
>>>>
>>>> The only alternative is to completely lock down the instance, and not
>>>> allow new users at all without manual approval of each and every one.
>>>>
>>>> People can just ask to be allowed to fork, but by default, allowing it
>>>> is not feasible.
>>>
>>> Hm, please help me understand what kind of spam we're talking about here.
>> I can't imagine somebody would take the effort for selling some pills to ffmpeg
>> developers. When it's about advertising anything, that's not the kind of reach
>> those people are typically looking for.
>>>
>>> Or is it about misusing repos for storage of illegal content? The largest file
>> currently is just 953kB, so we could enforce a limit small enough to make it
>> unattractive for this purpose (unlike GitHub with 100MB per file).
>>>
>>> We could also disallow repos with custom content (i.e. only forks of ffmpeg
>> are allowed as repo content).
>>>
>>> Then I wonder, where would be the harm? Some thousand unused forks of
>> ffmpeg shouldn't be a problem - but maybe I'm overseeing something?
>>
>> There are all sorts of copyrightable material that can be embedded
>> into a git repo.
> 
> That's why I mentioned that a file size limit could prevent this. With a 2 MB limit per file, it becomes totally unattractive for this kind of abuse.

That doesn't seem feasible to implement, given it's git.
Not even sure how to implement such a limit at all with git.
Some hook would need to check every file on push, which I don't think is 
something that readily exists.

And even then, there will be ways around it if someone is motivated enough.

>> Given that this all amounts to manpower from the operator
> 
> AFAIK, you are only responsible to take stuff down once you get notified, you don't need to actively look for anything.

I still wouldn't want to be the one hosting who knows what of illegal 
shit on our servers.

Also keep in mind that if they fork the FFmpeg repo, and then push 
something big and bad into that fork, it ends up in the same backing 
storage of git objects.
So it's not even trivial to just delete it again, and bar access to it.

You can ask Videolan about how a fully open Gitlab instance went for them.

>> Also payloads for malicious software.

> Okay, but when it's in a repo, what happens next? I mean why would somebody store that in a repo? What would be the goal?
> 
> Also, I wonder how this would be different from attachments on https://trac.ffmpeg.org ? There's no requirement for user "approval" as well..

We're just relatively lucky that trac is pretty uncommon and spambots 
targetting are more rare.
Also, our custom-baked captcha for trac has so far remained undefeated.

Before it was implemented, trac also had a lot of spambots.


> sw
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