Proving ownership of code with mercurial?

[Peter Arrenbrecht]

On Jan 2, 2008 9:34 AM, Dustin Sallings <dustin at spy.net> wrote:
>
> On Jan 1, 2008, at 23:59, Francesc Esplugas wrote:
>
> > I want to prove all the work I've done. I understand some of my code
> > can be a copy and paste from other projects or other developers, but
> > the idea is to prove I've been working on the project.
> >
> > Proving the integrity (hg verify) of the repository, could prove
> > nobody hacked it?
>
>
>         If you can update to a version whose ancestry includes your changes,
> then those changes are there.  Anyone who's cloned the tree would
> notice if you tried to rewrite history somewhere and pass it off as
> their upstream.
>
>         Sounds like you might be fighting an uphill battle, though.  Good luck.

Key point: If no one ever cloned your repo, then the repo's integrity
won't help you. It is easy to create a brand new repo with backdated
history. And if the repo contains only your changes (not interleaved
with changes by others), you would need the other party to have
demonstrably old clones which show your changes really are as old as
you claim.

But, as someone noted before, this is about who has to prove what. So:
what exactly do you want to prove? Time spent? Goals achieved? Lines
of code contributed? What?

And why do you feel you need to prove this? If they claim you
reattributed changes done by others to yourself, where are those
others? What grounds have they for making the claim? If they claim the
result is not worth 3 months' time, then the repo should show the
evolution of the result, which might show otherwise. But this does not
hinge on the repo's integrity.

-peter