Re: [gentoo-dev] Devmanual text on ChangeLogs

[Markos Chandras]

On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 03:33:25PM -0700, Brian Harring wrote:
> On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 10:08:31PM +0100, Markos Chandras wrote:
> > Since most ( if not all ) of us use the same message on the Changelog
> > and on the commit log, it probably worth the effort of having the rsync
> > servers create the Changelogs before populate the portage tree. Having
> > the servers do that, will also allow us to provide cut down Changelogs
> > ( lets say keep that last 10 entries ) so we can provide a more minimal
> > portage tree, size wise. A huge portage tree might not be a problem for
> > most of us but it sure is for embedded and all kind of similar systems.
>
> This opens up a bit of nastyness; either the service would have to
> resign all manifests (which defeats a fair bit of the signing intent),
> or ChangeLog's would have to pulled in full from cvs, generated
> strictly server side (else manifest will have stale chksums for it),
> and ChangeLog will have to exist outside of all validation.
>
> So... either resigning everywhere for regen, or having no validation
> asserted on the ChangeLog- meaning certain men in the middle have a
> nice area to inject some unfriendly things for anyone who happens to
> read it.
>
> ~harring
>

Thats a fair point but the way I see it we need to make a balanced
choice. Obviously is not feasible to have the rsync servers 
resign everything. This would require having all the gpg keys on the rsync
servers, fetch the developer's name from the last cvs commit and use his
key to resign it. It doesn't look that smart to me.
	Leaving Changelogs unprotected might be a bit of a trouble but it
certainly is not that big a deal. Nothing serious can happen if someone
hijacks a plain text file.
	In case people want to ensure
end-to-end point integrity, we can use a separate GPG key for the rsync
server. However, this will make our GPG keys useless, and having a
single key to sing 10.000 Manifest files does not look good either.

Regards,
-- 
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2