Re: [PATCH] Add the commit.gpgsign option to sign all commits

From: Nicolas Vigier <boklm@mars-attacks.org>
Date: Nov 5, 2013, 11:28 UTC
Message-ID: <20131105112840.GZ4589@mars-attacks.org>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqppqfag2e.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On Mon, 04 Nov 2013, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Nicolas Vigier <boklm@mars-attacks.org> writes:
> 
> > If you want to GPG sign all your commits, you have to add the -S option
> > all the time. The commit.gpgsign config option allows to sign all
> > commits automatically.
> 
> I'm somewhat horrified to imagine the end-user experience this
> "feature" adds to the system; if one sets htis configuration and
> then runs "git rebase" or anything that internally creates or
> recreates commits, does one have to sign each and every commit, even
> if such a rebase was done merely as a trial run to see if a topic
> can be rebased to an older codebase, or something?

If the problem is users having to type their passphrase to sign each commit, we can suggest using an agent in the option description :

  commit.gpgsign::
	A boolean to specify whether all commits should be GPG signed.
	Use of this option when doing operations such as rebase can
	result in a large number of commits being signed. It is therefore
	convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your gpg passphrase
	several times.

An example of why someone might want to use this option is :

You use git to store deployement scripts for some servers. Those servers have a cron job that pull from the git repository and run the scripts as root. Anyone with root access on the server hosting the git repository can then gain root access to all your servers quite easily. You want to avoid this, so you decide that all commits should be gpg signed, and your servers will now do "git pull --verify-signatures". People who work on this repository will want to set "commit.gpgsign" so they don't have to add the -S option all the time.