Re: make dist using git archive

On Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 10:50 AM Eli Schwartz <eschwartz93(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Ideally git commits should be signed, but that requires large numbers of
> people to have security-minded git commit habits. From a quick check of
> the postgres commit logs, only one person seems to be regularly signing
> commits, which does provide a certain measure of protection -- an
> attacker cannot attack via `git push --force` across that boundary, and
> those commits serve as verifiable states that multiple people have seen.
>
> The tags aren't signed either, which is a big issue for verifiably
> identifying the release artifacts published by the release manager. Even
> if not every commit is signed, having signed tags provides a known
> coordination point of code that has been broadly tested and code-signed
> for mass use.
>
> In summary, my opinion is that using git-get-tar-commit-id provides zero
> security guarantees, and if that's not something you are worried about
> then that's one thing, but if you were expecting it to *replace* signing
> the tarball, then that's.... very much another thing entirely, and not
> one I can agree at all with.

I read this part with interest. I think there's definitely something
to be said for strengthening some of our practices in this area. At
the same time, I think it's reasonable for Peter to want to pursue the
limited goal he stated in the original post, namely reproducible
tarball generation, without getting tangled up in possible policy
changes that might be controversial and might require a bunch of
planning and coordination. "GPG signatures are good" can be true
without "reproducible tarball generation is good" being false; and if
"git archive" allows for that and "meson dist" doesn't, then we're
unlikely to adopt "meson dist".

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com