Hi, I'm going to point out what the current state of the package signing code is and what is currently being worked on. As a warning I have just got home from a stay in hospital, so I might be ever so slightly terse in my reply. Don't take this as me being an arse... I just figured that it was better to reply now as opposed to giving no reply (as I will be heading back to hospital again soon). On 21/05/11 09:07, Kerrick Staley wrote:
As far as I can tell, there is no work going on right now on this issue.
What!!! There has there been no progress... in two weeks!!! That's right... it has been only two weeks since the last commit to do with package signing was pushed to the master git repo (http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/commit/?id=70cf4546). In fact, it currently 10 days, so it was 9 days when the original emails to this thread were sent. Shock, horror development has stalled! If that was not enough, one way to know the current status of development would be to look through this email lists archives. Hmm.. "trustdb locking issues" would be the last one. Seems a pretty big issue not being able to verify a package that has a signature file without root privileges. So that is probably a blocker that the people working on this have not solved yet. Note there were very, very few replies with suggestions on how to deal with that. On 21/05/11 09:07, Kerrick Staley wrote:
I think each developer should have their own key, that each package will only need one signature, and that the repolists will also be signed by the last dev to edit them.
Good to see you came up with the exact implementation we already have... Pacman reads a single signature for a package (either detached for -U or -Q operations, or in the repo db for -S operation) and the repo has a single detached signature. How those key are distributed across developers and what exactly is used in signing what is not a pacman concern and so has nothing to do with the implementation in pacman. Pacman just needs to take signatures and verify them. Note that how Arch will deal with signing in their repos is being finalised elsewhere, but to reiterate, that has nothing to do with the pacman implementation. So... onwards to what the current status is: - makepkg can build a package and sign it (using gpg) - repo-add can add a package signature to the database and sign the database - a key management tool call pacman-key is implemented. It still needs work and there are a bunch of patches on the mailing list for it. I hope to find time to finalise this in the near future... - pacman has basic signing support. It can: - download and verify the signature for the repo dbs - read package and verify their signatures from repo dbs on -S operations - read and verify detached signatures on -U operations (and -Q, but note above the issues with trustdb locking and root privileges) Things that need done: - figure out the locking issues (1777 permissions on the pacman gpg keyring directory is a workaround, but we may take the yum approach of copying that folder to a writeable location) ... In fact, just look at the list on my wiki page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Package_Signing . There is no point me replicating the list here. If you have specific queries about any point, ask specific questions. Most should be fairly clear if you actually take the code for a test spin. As far as what branches to use, all the gpg signing code that I had on a branch has been merged in to the pacman master branch (as stated on the above wiki page...). You might find WIP patches on a gpg branch in Dan's repo depending on what he is doing, or maybe my working branch. I was going to go into more detail on the status of what is done and what needs done, but the quickest way for anyone to find out is to grab the git repo, build it and start using it. Everything for makepkg and repo-add is documented in the man pages so hopefully that should be clear. So you should easily be able to create a signed package and add it to a local repo. If not, ask specific questions and we can improve the documentation. Then you can play around with pacman to see what appears to work and what does not. About the only thing that you need to know is there is a VerifySig option for pacman.conf that takes the value Always/Optional/Never and is given for each repo. If people want further info, ask specific questions. I'm not going to spend my time answering very basic questions about the current implementation that can be easily seen by anyone who spends a small amount of time doing some actual investigation by taking the code for a spin. If you don't have time to do this, then I doubt you have time to contribute anything... Cheers, Allan