Introduction

[Agustin Benito Bethencourt]

Hello,

My name is Agustín Benito Bethencourt. I have been supporting SwH for
the last couple of years as Ambassador (Industry Vertical). I think
SWHID can be instrumental for several critical activities in software.

Lately I have been helping Thomas A., CTO at Software Heritage, to
book and prepare presentations for ELISA, Eclipse SDV and OpenChain
(coming). It has helped me to take the step to introduce myself here
and be willing to contribute.

Looking forward to hearing from you about the initial steps I should take.

More information about myself: https://toscalix.com/background/about

Best Regards
--
Agustín Benito Bethencourt
Toscalix Consulting
https://toscalix.com/background/consultant/

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

Hello August, nice to find you here! And thanks for your interest in
helping out with the SWHID specification.

Now that SWHID v1 is standardized, the next major point on the roadmap
will be starting the work for SWHID v2. We have not yet discussed all
that should be in scope for it, but clearly one point would be migrating
hash algorithm from SHA1 (with collision detection) to SHA256.

So hands would definitely be very welcome in starting working on a draft
version of the spec, in a dedicated branch, where the migration SHA1 ->
SHA256 is done, to see how that will look like. It will also be a de
facto feasibility analysis, to see what breaks (if anything),
side-effects that we might be anywhere of, etc. This is definitely up
for grubs.

As a first approximation, "just" moving to SHA256 maintaining the
current hex encoding is what should be tried first. But that will
produces very long SWHIDs, to the point they will become impractical to
use in text. So I think we should also consider having a more compact
encoding for checksums, such as base64, and have a way to support both
encodings (discriminating on their length) for SWHIDv2. This just an
idea at this stage, but I mention it as it will probably be the next
step after giving a try to the previous one.

Hope this gives you, or others in the group, some ideas :-)
Cheers

On Thu, Nov 13, 2025 at 07:03:27PM +0000, Agustin Benito Bethencourt wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My name is Agustín Benito Bethencourt. I have been supporting SwH for
> the last couple of years as Ambassador (Industry Vertical). I think
> SWHID can be instrumental for several critical activities in software.
>
> Lately I have been helping Thomas A., CTO at Software Heritage, to
> book and prepare presentations for ELISA, Eclipse SDV and OpenChain
> (coming). It has helped me to take the step to introduce myself here
> and be willing to contribute.

--
Stefano Zacchiroli - https://upsilon.cc/zack
Full professor of Computer Science, Polytechnic Institute of Paris
Co-founder & CSO Software Heritage