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Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor
From: |
Eric Gallager |
Subject: |
Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor |
Date: |
Mon, 1 Apr 2024 17:14:02 -0400 |
On Mon, Apr 1, 2024 at 2:26 PM Zack Weinberg <zack@owlfolio.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 1, 2024, at 2:04 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > "Zack Weinberg" <zack@owlfolio.org> writes:
> >> It might indeed be worth thinking about ways to minimize the
> >> difference between the tarball "make dist" produces and the tarball
> >> "git archive" produces, starting from the same clean git checkout,
> >> and also ways to identify and audit those differences.
> >
> > There is extensive ongoing discussion of this on debian-devel. There's
> > no real consensus in that discussion, but I think one useful principle
> > that's emerged that doesn't disrupt the world *too* much is that the
> > release tarball should differ from the Git tag only in the form of
> > added files. Any files that are present in both Git and in the release
> > tarball should be byte-for-byte identical.
>
> That dovetails nicely with something I was thinking about myself.
> Obviously the result of "make dist" should be reproducible except for
> signatures; to the extent it isn't already, those are bugs in automake.
> But also, what if "make dist" produced *two* disjoint tarballs? One of
> which is guaranteed to be byte-for-byte identical to an archive of the
> VCS at the release tag (in some clearly documented fashion; AIUI, "git
> archive" does *not* do what we want).
Thinking about how to implement this: so, currently automake variables
have (at least) 2 special prefixes (that I can think of at the moment)
that control various automake behaviors: "dist" or "nodist" to control
inclusion in the distribution, and "noinst" to prevent installation.
What about a 3rd one of these prefixes: "novcs", to teach automake
about which files belong in VCS or not? i.e. then you might have a
variable name like:
dist_novcs_DATA = foo bar baz
...which would indicate that foo, bar, and baz are data files that
ought to be distributed in the release tarball, but not in the
VCS-based one? Or would it be easier to just teach automake to read
.gitignore files and the like so that it can get that information from
there?
> The other contains all the files that "autoreconf -i" or "./bootstrap.sh"
> or whatever would create, but nothing else. Diffs could be provided
> for both tarballs, or only for the VCS-archive tarball, whichever turns
> out to be more compact (I can imagine the diff for the generated-files
> tarball turning out to be comparable in size to the generated-files
> tarball itself).
>
> This should make it much easier to find, and therefore audit, the pre-
> generated files, and to validate that there's no overlap. It would add
> an extra step for people who want to build from tarball, without having
> to install autoconf (or whatever) first -- but an easier extra step
> than, y'know, installing autoconf. :) Conversely, people who want to
> build from tarballs but *not* use the pre-generated configure, etc,
> could now download the 'bare' tarball only.
>
> ("Couldn't those people just build from a git checkout?" Not if they
> don't have the tooling for it, not during early stages of a distribution
> bootstrap, etc. Also, the act of publishing a tarball that's a golden
> copy of the VCS at the release tag is valuable for archival purposes.)
>
Agreed on these points.
> zw
- Re: libsystemd dependencies, (continued)
- Re: libsystemd dependencies, Bruno Haible, 2024/04/01
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Jose E. Marchesi, 2024/04/01
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Zack Weinberg, 2024/04/01
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Russ Allbery, 2024/04/01
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Zack Weinberg, 2024/04/01
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor,
Eric Gallager <=
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Bruno Haible, 2024/04/01
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Jacob Bachmeyer, 2024/04/02
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Jacob Bachmeyer, 2024/04/02
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Russ Allbery, 2024/04/02
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Eric Gallager, 2024/04/02
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Jacob Bachmeyer, 2024/04/02
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Bruno Haible, 2024/04/02
- Re: checking aclocal m4 files (was: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor), Jacob Bachmeyer, 2024/04/02
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Richard Stallman, 2024/04/04
- Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor, Bruno Haible, 2024/04/04