this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
33 points (88.4% liked)

Programming

17424 readers
45 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
33
Unsigned Commits (blog.glyph.im)
submitted 9 months ago by AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
25 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 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.

[โ€“] electric@lemmy.world 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!