Hello!

Jelle Licht <[email protected]> skribis:

> The source tarball is one release artifact that nobody can reproduce
> easily. As far as I can see it is usually built by running "make dist" on
> some merry release team member's machine and contains generated files
> not in Git. This seems similar (enough) to the gap that xz backdoor made
> use of.
>
> I'm working on a rough series that builds the release tarball from a
> single commit with guix time-machine, so anyone can check it. Imagine
> being able to run something like this to reproduce the release tarball:
>
>   guix time-machine -q --commit=commit-after-tag-v1.6.0 -- build -e '((@ (gnu 
> ci release) guix-dist-tarball))'

What about this radical proposal: we stop publishing source tarballs.

Alternative proposal: we publish a tarball produced by ‘git archive’.

This would be in line with our stance on bootstrapping and with
<https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/milestone/66679>.

In practice, the only people impacted by this would be distros providing
Guix, such as Debian.  I doubt it would make a difference though: Debian
discards non-source artifacts, such as files produced by the autotools,
so that’s fine.

Of course we must keep providing signed tags and possibly update
documentation accordingly.

As a side effect, this proposal will simplify the release process, which
is always welcome. :-)

Thoughts?

Ludo’.

Reply via email to