this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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Unsigned Commits (blog.glyph.im)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm curious to hear what the Lemmy programming community thinks of this!

  • The author argues against signing Git commits, stating that it adds unnecessary complexity to systems.
  • The author believes that signing commits perpetuates an engineering culture of blindly adopting complex tools.
  • The consequences of signing Git commits are likely to be subtle and not as dramatic as some may believe.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/vjDeK

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[โ€“] eager_eagle 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

the information appended with a commit (username, time of commit, commit message)

it's not that, it's the cryptographic signature of the commit's contents with a private key, which allows verifiers to attest the integrity of the commit and authorship through the corresponding public key. The problem is that anyone can write anyone else's name and address in the author field. The signature would mitigate this impersonation problem.

And ultimately, that's a good thing. The article just puts into question the overall usefulness of it and how GitHub in particular handles this process.

[โ€“] electric 1 points 11 months ago

Thank you for explaining and for the article, that makes sense. I can't see any reason against having it, but I've never had to interact with that so I'm not qualified enough to form a concrete opinion!