Re: Commit signing

Hi,

On Mon, 15 Jan 2007, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Andy Parkins [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

I don't think the argument that Matthias offered ("You just explained 
why no one should pull from people he does not trust.") is a good one.  
One might not want trust to be transitive.  Just because I trust you, 
doesn't not mean that I trust those who you trust.  The path of 
getting commits in via a trusted person, perhaps even via multiple 
levels of transitive trust might not be something that is wanted in 
every project.  Having signed commits would at least give the option.

Yes, that's very valid.  But if you trust me and I've gone and built 100 
commits on top of something I got from someone else I trust but that you 
don't trust, you are going to reject all of my changes and ask that I 
rewrite them?  That's quite paranoid.

It is not only paranoid. It is bad practice.

We might be tempted to forget in these horrible times that distrust itself 
is a perpetuum mobile. Distrust results in distrust. And nobody being 
distrusted likes that fact. It makes for a bad working environment, for 
less code quality, and quite often, people get ideas from being 
distrusted: "If they think I could include a backdoor, well, that might 
actually be a good idea!".

Please have a look at the Linux kernel development, or for that matter, 
git development itself. Here, people care, people trust, people respect 
each other (sometimes YELLING, to keep discussions exciting). And the 
result is: nice code.

Ciao,
Dscho