workflow concept: automatic trusted group of committers

Goal

A workflow where the repository gets updated only from repositories whose heads got signed by at least a certain percentage or a certain number of trusted committers.

Requirements

Mercurial [1], two hooks for checking and three special files in the repo.

The hooks do all the work - apart from them, the repo is just a normal Mercurial repository. After cloning it, you only need to setup the hooks to activate the workflow.

Extensions: gpg

Hooks: prechangegroup and pretxnchangegroup

Files: .hgtrustedkeys , .hgbackuprepos , .hgtrustminimum

concept

Hooks

• prechangegroup: Copy the local versions of the files for access in the pretxnchangegroup hook (might be unnecessary by letting the pretxnchangegroup hook use the rollback-info).

• pretxnchangegroup:

  • per head: check if the tipmost non-signature changeset has been GnuPG signed by enough trusted keys.
  • If not all heads have enough signatures, rollback, discard the current default repo and replace it with the backup repo which has the most changesets we lack. Continue discarding bad repos until you find one with enough signatures.

Special Files

.hgtrustedkeys contains a list of public GnuPG keys.

.hgbackuprepos contains a list of (pull) links to backup repositories.

.hgtrustminimum contains the percentage or number of keys from which a signature is needed for a head to be accepted.

Notes

With this workflow you can even do automatic updates from the repository. It should be ideal for release repositories of distributed projects.

If you want to work on the project, a very worthwhile goal might be implementing it in infocalypse [2]: anonymous code collaboration via Freenet and Mercurial, built to survive the informational apocalypse (and any kind of censorship).