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Subject: |
[PATCH 0/6] Authenticated channels for everyone! |
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Date: |
Thu, 25 Jun 2020 23:04:00 +0200 |
Hello Guix!
This patch series follows up on channel authentication support:
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/41767
This time the goal is to expose and document the authentication
mechanism so that third-party channel authors can use it. This
should be the last series on this theme in the foreseeable
future. :-)
The most visible effect is that channel introductions are now
part of the API and shown by ‘guix describe’. It becomes a long-term
commitment because we want to be able to pass the output of
‘guix describe -C channels’ or /run/current-system/channels.scm
to ‘guix pull’ and ‘guix time-machine’ in the future.
Contrary to what I initially proposed¹, channel introductions are
stripped to the bare minimum: a commit/fingerprint pair (as is
currently the case on master, internally). I figured it doesn’t
buy us much to have the commit/fingerprint pair signed; what
matters is that users obtain the introduction from a trusted
source, and the signature wouldn’t help with that. I also got
rid of the idea of rendering introductions are opaque base64 blobs.
In the manual I tried to distinguish instructions for users
(“what do I need to put in my channels.scm file?”) from
instructions for channel authors (“how do I allow users of my
channel to authenticate it?”).
If people have a channel that they’d like to make “authenticable”,
please do try and report back! You can even test with master,
you only need to add ‘@@’ to access (guix channels) internals
to create the introduction.
Feedback welcome!
Thanks,
Ludo’.
¹ https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/22883#69
Ludovic Courtès (6):
channels: Add 'openpgp-fingerprint->bytevector'.
channels: Make channel introductions public.
channels: Remove 'signature' from <channel-introduction>.
channels: Save and interpret 'introduction' field in provenance data.
guix describe: Display channel introductions and add
'channels-sans-intro'.
services: provenance: Save channel introductions.
doc/guix.texi | 130 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
gnu/services.scm | 26 ++++++--
guix/channels.scm | 86 +++++++++++++++++++------
guix/scripts/describe.scm | 56 +++++++++++++---
guix/scripts/system.scm | 4 +-
tests/channels.scm | 10 ++-
6 files changed, 269 insertions(+), 43 deletions(-)
--
2.26.2
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--- Begin Message ---
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Subject: |
Re: [bug#42048] [PATCH 6/6] services: provenance: Save channel introductions. |
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Date: |
Wed, 01 Jul 2020 23:50:21 +0200 |
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User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.3 (gnu/linux) |
Hi,
Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> skribis:
> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> So yes, I suppose we would need to extend the ‘.guix-channel’ format for
>> dependencies. Luckily it should be quite simply because that format is
>> extensible; older Guix versions would ignore the ‘introduction’ field.
>> It would look something like this:
>>
>> (channel
>> (version 0)
>> (dependencies
>> (channel
>> (name some-collection)
>> (url "https://example.org/first-collection.git";)
>> (introduction (channel-introduction
>> (version 0)
>> (commit "…")
>> (signer "…"))))
>> (channel
>> (name some-other-collection)
>> (url "https://example.org/second-collection.git";)
>> (branch "testing")))) ;not an authenticated channel
>>
>> It does mean that a channel can indirectly trick you into turning off
>> authentication for a dependent channel. But I think that’s within the
>> expectations for channels: when you choose a channel, you trust it
>> enough to run its code.
>>
>> WDYT?
>
> This sounds reasonable. I agree that you’ve got to trust the channel
> authors anyway, so allowing them to provide the introduction is fair.
I went ahead and did that:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=d774c7b1218a3cc20079b19812da119f9ed26b54
Let me know what you think!
The whole series is now pushed:
d774c7b121 channels: Dependencies listed in '.guix-channel' can have an
introduction.
884df77640 channels: Properly diagnose test failure.
eb5cf39e66 services: provenance: Save channel introductions.
6d39f0cb77 guix describe: Display channel introductions and add
'channels-sans-intro'.
471550c28c channels: Save and interpret 'introduction' field in provenance
data.
22a9699257 channels: Remove 'signature' from <channel-introduction>.
8b7d982e6a channels: Make channel introductions public.
6577682a6c channels: Add 'openpgp-fingerprint->bytevector'.
Thanks for your feedback,
Ludo’.
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