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0007 — The public repository starts from a clean first commit

  • Status: accepted
  • Date: 2026-09-06
  • Deciders: @kalwei

Context

The project was developed privately from 2026-08-28. Its history contained personal paths, a lab password, and wording that identified where the maintainer works — none of it catastrophic, all of it permanent once public.

Options considered

Option For Against
Squash to a fresh first commit; keep the private repo as the archive zero risk of a missed string; the private history is not lost, only not published git blame and the 34 pull-request links do not carry over
Rewrite history with git filter-repo keeps the narrative a missed variant string is public forever
Publish as-is nothing to do the findings above stay public forever

Decision

The public repository's first commit is the cleaned tree at 0.1.0. The private repository stays intact as the archive. The private era's pull requests and tags are listed in docs/history/private-era.md so the narrative survives without the diffs.

Consequences

Easy: a clean start under the organisation. Hard: nothing; a solo author's 146 commits were not the audience's concern.

House rules touched

None. The provenance rule and the conduct file's no-employer-names clause are the same protection, applied to contributors.