Re: [pacman-dev] [PATCH] Disable embedded signatures by default

On 27/8/20 10:26 am, Anatol Pomozov wrote:

Hi

On Mon, Aug 10, 2020 at 2:45 PM Eli Schwartz wrote:

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On 8/10/20 5:34 PM, Anatol Pomozov wrote:

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Switching from embedded to detached signatures is a big change. This feature needs to be thoroughly tested before embedded signatures will be completely removed from the database.

To help with detached signatures testing we enable it by default. But in case if an user needs to go back to embedded signatures we add a config option to reenable it - "UseEmbeddedSignatures". What is the purpose of this? Either signature source should be equivalent,

Indeed the signatures are equivalent. The only difference whether they are stored inside the database file or as *.sig next to the packages itself.

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and you should be able to trivially test this by creating a repo with unsigned packages, then bulk-signing the packages after they were repo-added. I don't believe that pacman should include such an end-user option purely to double-check whether a current feature actually works.

The purpose of the change is to start using the detached signatures codepath. The detached signatures are shipped with repos for a long time and pacman can handle it. Now it is time to actually enable it by default.

"UseEmbeddedSignatures" option has been added as a fallback plan in case we find that the detached signatures codepath is broken. Do you think this is too much hassle and we should just start using detached signatures by default without any fallback config option?

I think we should test using detached signatures, and release without pacman having a fallback option in and of itself. The fallback option should be in repo-add, whether it adds the signatures to the database or not.

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This is the right approach, yeah. I was thinking we'd wait until pacman 6.1 before stopping the signature embedding, to provide a transition period for people depending on SigLevel = Required (which should be everyone, and certainly includes Arch!) to upgrade to 6.x before repo-add starts generating databases useless to pacman 5.x

There are 2 sets of changes that need to be done: 1) make pacman to use detached signatures instead of embedded ones 2) change "repo-add" to avoid adding embedded signatures

We should release changes for #1 first, test it, make sure that detached signatures fully work (while dbs still have pacman 5.x-compatible embedded sigs). And only then release #2 to get smaller databases compatible with pacman version >= 6.0.

I was thinking #1 can be released with 6.0 and #2 with 6.1.

I was thinking #2 would be an option to repo-add. I'm looking at making signature embedding only occur with the "--add-signatures" option (or whatever I decide to call it). Arch would need to patch devtools to use this option. They would then make a News announcement about the need to have pacman-6.0 installed after 3-6 months and stop repo-add including signatures. However, I think pacman should always use the signatures in the database if they are present. Particularly if they are not embedded by default. So to actually test the detached signature path, I am thinking it best to tag 6.0.0beta1, make a package from that tag with a patch to enable using detached signatures as a priority. While that is not an ideal approach to testing, I think the current code path is well tested, and this should be a reasonably trivial patch. Allan