Improving support for signed revisions

Lasse Kliemann lasse-list-mercurial-2009 at mail.plastictree.net
Sat May 9 06:53:57 CDT 2009


* Message by -Lasse Kliemann- from Thu 2009-05-07:

> The desire to mark certain revisions as trustworthy gives 
> motivation for providing as many signatures as possible, in the 
> best case for each revision. He who wishes to provide a signature 
> for signalling trustworthiness might have a much easier job if he 
> can trust certain committers *and* he can trust that a commit 
> allegedly made by one of these trusted committers was in fact 
> made by that trusted committer.
> 
> I wonder how one could otherwise make sure that a revision is 
> trustworthiness, unless one *in* *detail* (e.g., by looking at 
> all the diffs, line by line) checks each and every commit made 
> since the last trustworthiness signature.

To put it another way: without some crypto sig on each revision, 
it is even impossible to tell whether two revisions were made by 
the same person. The 'user:' entry for a revision is similar to 
the 'From:' header in an e-mail: the sender can put anything 
there, claiming to be anyone else.

This might be irrelevant for a project with a handful of 
developers that know each other personally. But it *is* an issue 
in several other cases.
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