Transparent file encryption in git
I’ve blogged before about Advent of Code and how I’ve been doing it each year since it began in 2015 and wrote a benchmarking tool for it - AoCBench.
A few years ago when I first wrote AoCBench, there was limited formal guidelines from Eric with regards to repo content, specifically, the closest thing to “offical” guidelines for commiting inputs to repos was a couple of social media posts that essentially stated that it was fine, but just don’t go collecting them all:
In general I ask people not to publish their inputs, just to make it harder for someone to try to steal the whole site. The answer is probably fine, but also probably not very interesting since they vary per person.
I don’t mind having a few of the inputs posted, please don’t go on a quest to collect many or all of the inputs for every puzzle. Doing so makes it that much easier for someone to clone and steal the whole site. I put tons of time and money into Advent of Code, and the many inputs are one way I prevent people from copying the content.
– https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/7lesj5/comment/drlt9am/
And also other comments where it wasn’t actively discouraged, but preferred not to.
So AoCBench was designed around all the participants including their own inputs in the repo and this allowed nice things like testing of solutions against different inputs to ensure validity (something you otherwise can’t really do.)
However sometime last year shortly after the start of the month this policy changed (Before / After) and an explicit request was added to the site not to:
If you’re posting a code repository somewhere, please don’t include parts of Advent of Code like the puzzle text or your inputs.
This policy was also codified on the official subreddit and moderators (and other users) started actively (and often aggressively) checking the repos of anyone who posted and insisting they immediately remove any inputs (and purge them from git history) and sometimes resulting in users being banned for not complying. This also hurt a bit with debugging solutions where sometimes different inputs have different properties that may trip some people up.
I don’t want to get too much into any legal technicalities around this and if the inputs are or aren’t copyrightable, or how it has been handled and the negatives around it. I just want to continue enjoying Advent of Code each year with my friends and our benchmarking tool, and if I can respect the request then I’ll do that as well.
For the first year (last year) we continued as-is, but this year people using AoCBench felt stronger about not including inputs in the repos. So how can we do this?