[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Add a timestamp file into repo tarballs

[Eli Schwartz]

On 11/5/19 9:03 AM, Allan McRae wrote:
> On 5/11/19 11:58 pm, Morten Linderud wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 05, 2019 at 11:54:34PM +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
>>> When creating or modifying repo tarballs, place a .TIMESTAMP file with
>>> seconds since epoch in it.  This will be used in the future to enable
>>> rejecting databases older that a given threshold.
>>>
>>> Also skip reading the .TIMESTAMP file in sync_db_populate().
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>
>>> ---
>>>
> 
> <snip>
> 
>>> diff --git a/scripts/repo-add.sh.in b/scripts/repo-add.sh.in
>>> index caf1232d..c87409f1 100644
>>> --- a/scripts/repo-add.sh.in
>>> +++ b/scripts/repo-add.sh.in
>>> @@ -526,6 +526,7 @@ create_db() {
>>>  	TAR_OPT=$(verify_repo_extension "$REPO_DB_FILE")
>>>  	# $LOCKFILE is already guaranteed to be absolute so this is safe
>>>  	dirname=${LOCKFILE%/*}
>>> +	timestamp=$(date +%s)
>>
>> This should probably utilize SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH or something equivalent?
>>
>> timestamp=$(date --date="@${SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH:-$(date +%s)}" +%s))
> 
> Why?  I can see no reason why it should...

I don't either see value in "reproducible builds" for the actual state
of the database. It's just a series of plaintext pointers to some other
(hopefully reproducible) packages.

If we actually did want to respect SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, we'd need to do a
lot more, like doing that for the bsdtar metadata (both file timestamps
and file owners, probably sort files too, etc.) but again, I don't see
how this protects the supply chain.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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