Re: [PATCHv3 0/5] verify-commit: verify commit signatures

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 23, 2014, 17:52 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq61jrcy3d.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20140623172805.GD4838@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 09:05:46AM +0200, Michael J Gruber wrote:
>
>> This incorporates all remarks about the test coding guidelines and
>> rearranging the series.
>> 
>> Open questions:
>> - There was some debate about (optionally) verifying more than what
>> git-verify-{commit,tag} currently do, or going for a generic git-verify command.
>> The former would require both to be changed (in order to treat similar cases similarly),
>> the latter would need a deprecation for git-verify-tag.
>
> I think that a potential "git verify" doesn't need to block this series,
> per the logic I gave elsewhere.
>
> The one thing that does give me pause is that we do not seem to have any
> way of accessing mergetag signatures. We should perhaps stop and think
> for a second about how we might expose those (and whether it would fit
> into the "git-verify-{commit,tag}" paradigm). I am tempted to say that
> "git verify-tag" on a commit should verify the mergetag (right now it
> would simply be an error). But I haven't though that hard on it.

I agree that "verify-commit" that lives next to "verify-tag" is fine and does not have to wait for a unified "verify" that may not even be a good idea, but if we were to verify the mergetags in one of these "verify-$OBJECTTYPE" commands, I would think "verify-commit" should be the one to check them, for the simple reason that they appear in "commit" objects, not in "tag" objects.

I would imagine that I would not mind too much if "verify-tag" delegated the verification to "verify-commit" automatically when it is given a commit object, but for a command fairly low-level to be useful for scripting, such a DWIMmage may be too unexpected and make them unnecessarily unreliable. Using scripts that want strictness (and who in the right mind that wants to verify things do not want strictness?) would need to "cat-file -t" upfront to switch on the object type.