shankar0123
09c29b9f40
Phase 0 follow-up — Pattern A migration (post-Pattern-C trailer strip + archive tag deletion). Updates the public-facing explanation to match the post-strip state: no more Co-authored-by trailers in commit messages, no more archive tag on origin. The off-platform bundle remains as the canonical pre-rewrite preservation record. Why the change from Pattern C → A: the Co-authored-by trailers added in the original rewrite caused GitHub to render the AI identities (claude, cowork, certctl-bot, certctl-copilot, github-actions) as co-author chips on every AI-touched commit AND count them in the repo's contributor graph. Operator opted to clean the contributor list. The legal posture (counsel-signed AI-authorship declaration in cowork/legal/) is unchanged — only the git-history layer's transparency signal was dialed back. Bundle at cowork/legal/pre-rewrite-2026-05-13.bundle still preserves the original history (all 14 author identities + un-stripped commit messages) for any future forensic / diligence question.
4.1 KiB
Git history normalization — 2026-05-13
Last reviewed: 2026-05-13
This page documents a one-time normalization of certctl's git history
that landed on master on 2026-05-13. If you are reading this because
your clone failed to fast-forward, or because a commit SHA you bookmarked
no longer resolves, this is the explanation.
What changed
Every commit's author and committer metadata was rewritten to a
single canonical identity (shankar0123 <skreddy040@gmail.com>). The
14 pre-rewrite author identities — operator name variants plus
AI/automation identities (Claude, Copilot, cowork agent, certctl-bot,
etc.) — collapsed to that one canonical author.
No source-code content was changed by the rewrite. Every line of code
in every commit is byte-for-byte identical to its pre-rewrite version.
Only the author and committer metadata fields were touched; commit
messages, subject lines, milestone IDs (M49, L-1, etc.), and every
other line of every commit's body are preserved verbatim.
Why
Two reasons:
-
LLC ownership transfer. The codebase is now legally owned by certctl LLC, which the operator incorporated to hold rights in the project. The BSL 1.1 Licensor field in
LICENSEflipped from a natural-person name tocertctl LLCin the same change set. Uniform per-commit authorship under one canonical operator identity makes the chain of title between the codebase and the LLC unambiguous. -
Pre-traction cleanup. The rewrite cost of git-history normalization scales with how many external clones and references have calcified against specific commit SHAs. Doing it now, before the project has a large external surface, minimizes disruption to downstream consumers.
What is preserved
A complete off-platform bundle backup of the pre-rewrite tree is held by the operator (off-repo, not pushed). It contains every original commit SHA, every original author identity, and the full ref graph as it existed before the rewrite. The bundle is the immutable preservation record and is recoverable forever.
An archive/pre-author-normalization-2026-05-13 tag briefly existed
on origin pointing at the pre-rewrite tip but was removed when the
operator opted to clean the contributor graph of pre-rewrite
authorship signal. The bundle remains as the canonical archive — any
forensic question about pre-rewrite state can be answered by loading
the bundle into a fresh clone (git clone pre-rewrite-2026-05-13.bundle).
Recovering after the rewrite
If you had a clone of certctl from before 2026-05-13, your local history diverged from origin's at the rewrite. Easiest recovery:
cd certctl
git fetch origin
git fetch origin --tags
git reset --hard origin/master
This force-aligns your local tree with the new origin. Any local branches you had based on pre-rewrite history will need rebasing onto the new master.
If you need to inspect the pre-rewrite state for a forensic or diligence question, contact the operator directly — the off-platform bundle is the canonical archive and is available on request.
Container images and release tarballs
ghcr.io container images that were published before the rewrite
(ghcr.io/certctl-io/certctl-{server,agent}:<old-tag>) remain pullable
indefinitely. Their OCI source-SHA labels reference commit SHAs that
no longer resolve in the public origin — the images themselves still
work; only the source-SHA back-reference is now orphan. New release
images published after the rewrite reference current SHAs normally.
If you downloaded a release tarball before the rewrite, the tarball's
contents are unchanged; only its associated git SHA differs from the
current v2.x.y tag (which has been re-pointed to the rewritten
commit at the same logical point in history).
Operational note for contributors
Future contributions to certctl should be authored under the operator's canonical git identity. Pull requests from external contributors will need a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) workflow, which the project will set up before accepting external PRs. Until then, the project does not solicit or accept external code contributions.