Dear Authors,

Thanks for providing and explaining these important principles. Regarding the "reasons that a commit reference together with a repository URL is not recommended for the purposes of software citation" I wonder about your opinions on the following counter-arguments that I believe have materialised since this publication.

1. Commit hashes can be guaruanteed to be permanent by protecting branches against force-pushing and deletion, see https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/protected_branches.html for example. The GitLab of my instution even seems to have this on by default.

2. Given the popularity of GitLab as a self-hosted git platform, and their future strategy, might this recommendation change to "institutions, please provide such platforms and ensure long-term availability"?

3. Assuming that

a) the Pages features of GitHub and GitLab are becoming more popular to generate websites from a Git repo,

b1) the mostly-just-1-click distance from there to landing page, documentation, issue tracker, change history, etc. (provided by the hosting software), as opposed to

b2) authors/developers might need to provide the links from a landing page back to these items themselves, and

c) the fact that most code-hosts render a project's README right beside/below the repo,

the repo URL might become the central hub of a software project, and thus the preferred touch-point between software authors and interested users.

Therefore, what are your current opinions on the proposition that citing the repo URL could (maybe not yet, but soon) be more useful to readers who want to follow a reference to a software, than if they were referred to a landing page?

Thank you, and kind regards, Katrin Leinweber