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by woodruffw 588 days ago
If it did, it was well before I ever began to work on PyPI. By the time I came around, PGP signature support was vestigial twice over and the public key discovery network on the Internet was rapidly imploding.

(But also: having PyPI be the keyserver defeats the point, since PyPI could then trivially replace my package's key. If that's the "whole story," it's not a very good one.)

2 comments

This attestation doesn’t change a ton with that, though. The point is to provide chain of custody — it got to my computer, from pypi, from ???. The PGP signature, much like a self-signed android app, verifies that it continues to be the same person.
The critical difference with this architecture is that it doesn’t require key discovery or identity mapping: those are properties of the key infrastructure, similarly to the Web PKI.

Your self-signed app analogy is apt: self-signing without a strong claimant identity proof is a solution, but a much weaker one than we wanted.

It was a plural you. I have no idea who you personally are.