repo.zoidberg.org / site guide / About the Mob Account

The mob account (the name a tribute to the paper Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code) is a way to enable anonymous push access for your project. This is largely an experiment and may be scrapped in the future if it will not get widespread use, but I think it's an interesting try. The idea is to provide unmoderated side channel for random contributors to work on a project, coming from the same place as e.g. Wikipedia - that given enough interested people, the quality will grow rapidly and occassional "vandalism" will get fixed quickly. Of course this may not work nearly so well for software, but here we are, to give it a try.

For Repository Admins

How it works? First, you need to add the mob user to the list of users allowed to push in your project. mob is a keyless, passwordless user that anyone can use to push, without any special setup. But this does not mean that your project is now in the hands of raging mindless mob! The mob user has a special restriction: it can push only to an existing mob branch. This means that the second step you need to take is to create a mob branch in the repository (e.g. git checkout -b mob && git push origin mob). Then the mob user will be able to push to that and only that branch, and it won't be able to push whatsoever until you take the second step.

To sum it up: Anonymous pushes are allowed only to the mob branch and only if you add a mob user and do an initial pushout of the mob branch.

For Users

After cloning the repository, do git checkout mob to move to the mob branch.

Note that you are taking a huge security risk on yourself if you just blindly grab the mob branch and run it on your system.

For Developers

Just commit on the mob branch you've checked out and git push when the time is ripe. Have fun and enjoy, you are making the history!