Subject: Re: How to gpg signed email patches?

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:12:17 -0700

"brian m. carlson" <[email-masked]> writes:

> I know that Git definitely does not know how to verify those signatures,
> though, so many people would end up not verifying them.

True that many people would end up not verifying them, but I do not
think Git has much to do with that.

Some contributors seem to send PGP signed patches to this list (and
I once mildly asked them not to, but these days I simply do not
care), and if I had their public keys marked as trusted, my
mail-reading environment would do the verification for me totally
outside Git (as this part of the workflow is not about Git, but
about communicating over authenticated and cryptographically
protected messages, whose contents happen to be patches), and I'll
just "git am" knowing that the patch is from the contributor who has
access to that trusted key.

The "key" (no pun intended) in the above is "if I had" part.  The
overhead of retrieving, validating, and keeping the key for a
contributor becomes worth it only after the contributor turns out to
be very prolific one.  The Web of trust, while was very attractive
as a concept, is not so convenient to maintain well enough to be
relied on as an infrastructure.