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

  • cadekat
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    11 months ago

    This doesn’t hold. Commit signature is a feature of git itself, even though the article chooses to focus on GitHub. And afaik github integration of signatures doesn’t break code hosting elsewhere, GH merely allows you to register your GPG signature with them so they’re able to validate the commits, but the author is still able to enroll the same GPG key to other hosts.

    Not only that, but GitHub rewrites signatures on rebase (and sometimes on fast forward merge) with their own private key. Using signatures on GitHub is basically pointless.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      true, that happens to me all the time

      edit: I think they just rewrite the commit without signing it, not with their private key. Either way, the first signature is lost on rebasing.