this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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Programming

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Unsigned Commits (blog.glyph.im)
submitted 9 months ago by AnActOfCreation to c/programming
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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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Can someone explain this article? I'm not sure what signing a commit is. If it's the information appended with a commit (username, time of commit, commit message), then it sounds insane to be against that. It's so helpful to not only know who did what in case you need to reach out to the person behind something, but also knowing the why behind it can be important.

The majority of the issues the author has seem strange to me. I can understand not wanting GitHub to be this central authority. However, in what world is making a commit to a repo indicative of one endorsing every single line in a repo? And the security issues just come down to "don't let your data leak". Though that could be an issue if GitHub leaks it themselves.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 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!