GPG-Signed Commits proposal

[Sylvain Beucler]

Hello,

I wondered whether it would be possible to simply add commit
signatures to CVS (I'm getting challenged about that when trying to
improve the CVS installation at Savannah).


The simplest way I though of, would be to sign my commit message, with
additional 'Headers' specifying the user name and a SHA-1/MD5 hash of
the file in the current revision (without keyword expansion).

Or more generally, perform something similar to Monotone, that is, add
a concatenation of signed assertions about the code.


The commit message would be bigger, but GPG-signed message are
'blocks' that can easily be ignored or simplified by 3rd-party
software such as ViewCVS.


A complete check would be long, with the need to compute each revision
and test it against the checksum, but we can't sign deltas, since CVS
uses (changing) reverse deltas. That check would be possible anyway,
and is usually needed only for the latest revision.


Does this sound plausible? How much time do you think it would take to
a good CVS hacker to implement this in CVS (or even code this as an
external wrapper?). If you think that's possible maybe I could
implement a prototype myself.

Cheers,

-- 
Sylvain