Why should I care about lightweight vs. annotated tags?

Question

I switched from Subversion to Git as my day-to-day VCS last year and am still trying to grasp the finer points of \"Git-think\".

The one which has been bothering me

Answer 1

Signing a tag is an easy way to assert the authenticity of a release.

This is particularly useful in a DVCS because anyone can clone the repository and modify history (e.g. via git-filter-branch). If a tag is signed, the signature will not survive a git-filter-branch operation, so if you have a policy that every release is tagged and signed by a committer, it's possible to detect a bogus release tag in the repository.

If it weren't for signing, I wouldn't see much point in annotated tags either.