Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal to undeprecate EGO_SUM

[John Helmert III]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 05:28:00PM +0200, Florian Schmaus wrote:
> I would like to continue discussing whether we should entirely deprecate
> EGO_SUM without the desire to offend anyone.
>
> We now have a pending GitHub PR that bumps restic to 0.14 [1]. Restic is
> a very popular backup software written in Go. The PR drops EGO_SUM in
> favor of a vendor tarball created by the proxied maintainer. However, I
> am unaware of any tool that lets you practically audit the 35 MiB source
> contained in the tarball. And even if such a tool exists, this would
> mean another manual step is required, which is, potentially, skipped
> most of the time, weakening our user's security. This is because I
> believe neither our tooling, e.g., go-mod.eclass, nor any Golang
> tooling, does authenticate the contents of the vendor tarball against
> upstream's go.sum. But please correct me if I am wrong.
>
> I wonder if we can reach consensus around un-depreacting EGO_SUM, but
> discouraging its usage in certain situations. That is, provide EGO_SUM
> as option but disallow its use if
> 1.) *upstream* provides a vendor tarball
> 2.) the number of EGO_SUM entries exceeds 1000 and a Gentoo developer
> maintains the package
> 3.) the number of EGO_SUM entries exceeds 1500 and a proxied maintainer
> maintains the package

I'm not sure I agree on these limits, given the authenticity problem
exists regardless of how many dependencies there are.

> In case of 3, I would encourage proxy maintainers to create and provide
> the vendor tarball.
>
> The suggested EGO_SUM limits result from a histogram that I created
> analyzing ::gentoo at 2022-01-01, i.e., a few months before EGO_SUM was
> deprecated.
>
> - Flow
>
> 1: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/27050
>