Re: Renaming the default branch in the Verifiable Credentials WG repositories

> On 5 Feb 2021, at 20:00, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2/5/21 10:27 AM, Ivan Herman wrote:
>> (The branch renaming mechanism of github is not without glitches… Sorry 
>> about that.)

> Uh oh... that never should have happened at this point. It means that two
> safeties that we had in the ecosystem have failed:
> 
> 1. The VC contexts are hosted at W3C. Github shouldn't
>   have anything to do with those contexts at this point.
>   W3C should fix this.

To be clear of what happened: it seems that "renaming" a branch on github, with their recently introduced feature, does not regenerate a github.io web site based on the 'pages' feature, or it takes a sometimes very long time. What is a little bit more surprising (and this is what happened here) is that this is also true for a branch that, in theory, was not affected by the change (the repo setup is such that github.io is served from the gh-pages branch, not by the default branch, ie, not from the 'main', previously 'master' branch). That is what happened here, I had to force the regeneration manually.

"W3C should fix this": what do you mean? The WG's decision was to keep the context file on github, and to set up a redirection. Do you mean that the context files should be copied and stored on W3C? 

> 
> 2. No software should be loading the v1 context from a URL
>   redirect at this point -- DNS cache poisoning could
>   create an issue for you. You should be loading
>   the VC v1 context from a known good version that
>   is from local storage (HDD, SDD, NVMe, etc.) at all
>   times. Troy, you'll want to look into this for
>   whatever software you're using.

See my point above.

All that being said: we may not want to overreact. The branch renaming mechanism is a new feature that I do not expect will happen in the future. The chances of a glitch, like the W3C server being down for whatever reasons, has just about the same probability.

Ivan

> 
> -- manu
> 
> -- 
> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches
> https://tinyurl.com/veres-one-launches
> 


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Ivan Herman, W3C 
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