I didn't claim it solves "roughly the same problem", only a very relevant subset of the problem (integrity) closely related to the unfortunate situation rubygem

I didn't claim it solves "roughly the same problem", only a very relevant subset of the problem (integrity) closely related to the unfortunate situation rubygems is in right now. What you call background (docs, tooling, education) is an argument in favor of the simple approach, which is already implemented and just not enforced - in contrast to whipping up new infrastructure of significantly higher complexity from scratch. Also I didn't imply the maintainers are ignorant or lazy, they were merely oblivious. So I'll repeat: The PGP approach is obviously superior, but comes with serious complexity and implementation concerns (there is no native PGP-library in ruby). Consequently it might make sense to add basic security right now, in a minimally intrusive fashion, while a more complete solution is developed. This, by the way, is part of the discussion that the rubygems team is having right now[1]. [1] https://github.com/rubygems-trust/rubygems.org/wiki/Overview https://github.com/rubygems-trust/rubygems.org/wiki/Overview