Re: Question about scm security holes

[Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
> On Thu, 4 Mar 2010, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> 
> > An attack in which someone untraceably modified the repo to contain 
> > modified code would be a little more interesting.

> > git makes this sort of thing pretty much impossible to do without it 
> > being *noticeable* at least.
> 
> That is not true in all cases.
> 
> If you're talking about a workflow as git.git has it, you're right, there 
> is a maintainer, and a refused push would ring all kinds of alarm bells 
> there.

[...]
> It gets even much, much worse in the common setup of companies: a central 
> repository. (The two main reasons why a central repository is used are: 
> tradition (we did it with Subversion, too), and bottleneck problems: a 
> single maintainer reviewing all changes is often deemed too expensive 
> and slow.)

About "bottleneck problem".  Frederick Brooks wrote in his seminal
book "The Mythical Man-Month" that recommended way of organizing teams
is *with a maintainer*.  But this is less known that his most famous
statement: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it
later." (The Brooks's Law)... and I guess companies do not know about
this one either :-)

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git