What does "exist in the present context" mean?

[TomHennen]

What does "exist in the present context" mean?

Originally posted by @marcelamelara in #1094 (comment)

@zachariahcox

for git repos, a revision is just a tree id in a big database.
Preventing trees from existing can only happen at push receive time and causes a ton of developer friction.

Especially when teams rely on pull requests, the "reachable from this ref" security boundary is the most practical. It models whether a commit / tree id is included in a specific subset. That subset has certain properties. I think that's what we're saying by context here, but it might need some additional definition here!

[zachariahcox]

I think we're proposing a new definition:

"Revision context": a named subset of all revisions in the database. Inclusion in the subset can be governed by policy.

[TomHennen]

To be honest, a lot of that went over my head. :p

I was going to suggest just removing "in its present context", but I think what you're after is protecting the association of refs with the revision. That makes me think this is related to the source_branches field in the VSA.

So maybe "A source attestation contains information about how a specific revision was created and how it came to have any branches, tags, or other refs associated with it."

WDYT?