Track database changes in repository to allow for reverts in case of vandalism and edit history

[epilys]

A proposal:

1. Track changes in an sqlite3 database file
2. Create new branch in repository with a new root (i.e. it will not share history with the source code branches) for tracking the data. The data will be in plain text since committing binary files to git is bad for compression and readability.
3. When changed, create a plain text dump of the database using https://datasette.io/tools/sqlite-diffable
4. If different from current version in repository, create a commit by triggering a webhook to start a workflow dispatch with input being the diff to apply (see https://docs.github.com/en/webhooks/webhook-events-and-payloads#workflow_dispatch)

[twiss]

Perhaps a simpler solution could be to fetch and store https://implementations.modernemail.org/implementations.db using a GitHub Action that runs every day or so? That way, at most a day of edits would be lost in the event of vandalism.

[mjl-]

I've been running a daily cron job that makes a backup of the db file.
Indeed it seems simply reverting the whole db may be good enough. Perhaps with manual diffing of the json versions. If it ever comes to vandalism, we'll probably quickly implement a way to (partially) restore previous versions.

Btw, a changelog of changes, displayed on the app, could be useful too. For detecting bad edits, and to get a feeling for activity.