[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 6"""
 date="2024-04-30T19:53:43Z"
 content="""
On trust, it seems to me that if someone chooses to install a
particular special remote, they are choosing to trust whatever kind of
computations it supports.

Eg a special remote could choose to always run a computation inside a
particular container system and then if you trust that container system is
secure, you can choose to install it.

Enabling the special remote is not necessary, because a
repository can be set to autoenable a special remote. In some sense this is
surprising. I had originally talked about enabling here and then I
remembered autoenable.

It may be that autoenable should only be allowed for
special remote programs that the user explicitly whitelists, not only
installs into PATH. That would break some existing workflows, though
setting some git configs would not be too hard.

There seems scope for both compute special remotes that execute code that
comes from the git repository, and ones that only have metadata about the
computation recorded in the git repository, in a way that cannot let them
execute arbitrary code under the control of the git repository.

A well-behaved compute special remote that does run code that comes from a
git repository could require an additional git config to be set to allow it
to do that.
"""]]
