Discussion for CUSTOM_TEXT feature

[amychurchwell]

CUSTOM_TEXT is currently out of scope for a feature request because the proposed solution of deleting the entire repo and recreating it for the correct contribution history on a repo is outside the permissions of GITHUB_TOKEN. However, I think it's a super cool idea & I'd love to explore it more.

Unfortunately though, commits made on a GitHub repository will always show on the graph even if those commits are later removed through a force push.

According to the github contribution docs the commits that are counted in the graph are "in the repository's default branch". My first thought was that the commit history could be added to a different branch that replaces the repo's default branch, then the original default branch is deleted.

However: at a glance, it does not seem that the token is allowed to delete anything whatsoever? And It's unclear if it's allowed to change the default branch of a repo. 🤔

[bcanseco]

Now that I think more about it, my original idea of deleting the entire repo would probably get hairy if that deletion happens on a GitHub Actions run within that repo. 😅

I like the idea to change the default branch to accomplish this, though. We could document in the README that anyone wanting to use CUSTOM_TEXT would need to provide a personal access token with the repos scope instead of the normal GITHUB_TOKEN.

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2023 edit: this might be easier now with in-yaml customization of GITHUB_TOKEN permissions: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-jobs/assigning-permissions-to-jobs