When NOT to use sgit

Every tool earns trust faster by stating its edges. Here are sgit's, plainly.

Don't use sgit if…

• You need a secrets manager. sgit refuses to commit .env files, .netrc, private keys and friends, deliberately. Use a purpose-built secrets manager for credentials; use sgit for documents, data, and working files.
• You need long-term API stability guarantees today. sgit is in beta: it powers production workflows daily and the vault format is versioned (sgit migrate handles upgrades), but commands and flags can still evolve between minor versions. Keep sgit vault backup archives of anything precious.
• You need partial commits. There is no staging area, a commit snapshots the whole folder. If your workflow depends on committing three of seven changed files, sgit will fight you (use branches instead, or split folders into separate vaults).
• Your data is huge binaries that change constantly. Large files work (they're chunk-uploaded past a ~4 MB threshold), but sgit is built for working sets of documents and code-sized files, not video archives. Storage is versioned: history keeps old ciphertext around until pruned.
• You want the server to do things with your data. Zero knowledge cuts both ways: the server cannot index, search, preview, or process your content. All intelligence lives client-side. That is the point.
• You lose keys. There is no password reset, no recovery, no back door. That's a feature, but only if your key management is real. Password manager, plus sgit vault backup --include-key somewhere safe.

Current gaps (roadmap, honestly)

• Commit author attribution is not yet recorded, in multi-agent vaults, per-agent identity currently comes from branch IDs, not signed authorship. Signature slots exist in the format; population is planned work.
• Merge drivers are whole-file three-way. Structured merges (JSON-aware, union) are designed but not yet shipped.
• Bare clones (clone --bare) are incomplete.
• Partial clones have two edges. A folder renamed by someone else silently leaves a scoped clone's scope, and a pull will not warn; re-clone or widen to the new name. And a scoped clone cannot see objects missing elsewhere in the vault, so sgit check fsck, sgit dev dump, sgit publish and sgit vault move need a full clone. See Partial clones.
• A partial clone is not an access boundary. --path decides what is downloaded, not what can be read: the clone holds the vault key, and sgit fetch <folder> widens it to any folder. To keep agents out of each other's memory, give each its own vault. See Self-hosting a vault server for agents.
• The full CLI reference on this site is still being wired to its generator (it will be produced from the CLI's own argument parser on every release, so it can never go stale).

What PKI does not do yet

Keypairs ship and work, keygen, export, import, sign, verify, encrypt, decrypt all round-trip on v0.15.0. The layer around them is thinner than the primitives:

• No revocation, expiry or rotation workflow. No CRL, no sgit pki revoke. A compromised private key means generating a new pair and redistributing the bundle out of band, by hand.
• No directory and no web of trust. Verifying that a fingerprint belongs to who you think is entirely your problem, compare out of band, as with SSH host keys.
• Lane addressing is not wired end to end. The intended model is append_token = H(public key), so a sender derives your message lane address from the key you published. The server side ships; no shipped command emits that token, so today you agree one out of band. Details and the interim recipe are in the addressing note.
• Only the first mode is built. Signing and encrypting files, plus the append transport. The richer modes (group addressing, key discovery, delegated capability) are designs, not code.

Said plainly because the alternative is worse: an agent that reads an over-claiming page will build on a step that does not exist, and only find out at runtime.

If one of these gaps blocks you, say so on GitHub, real usage reports move the roadmap.

This page as markdown · its source, admin/content/docs/limitations.md