> That wouldn't be acceptable unless we had the appropriate audit patterns in 
> place,
> any arbitrary objects could be submitted to lib/signed/ and then immediately
> retrieved with a signature.

Let me attempt to clarify my suggestion. Artifacts would never actually be 
submitted to /lib/signed. This would be a "virtual" directory, so to speak. 
Unsigned JARs would be deployed to /lib, signed on the fly by the web server, 
and cached in /lib/signed.

Only authorized users would be allowed to publish content to the lib directory, 
in the same way that only authorized users can push other, non-JAR, content out 
to a site. For example, let's say I want to update the Pivot home page, and 
that the home page includes a Pivot applet. I would publish the following files 
to the site's root directory:

index.html
lib/
  pivot-core.jar
  pivot-wtk.jar
  pivot-wtk-terra.jar
  pivot-demos.jar

Now, if my applet doesn't require security privileges, it won't need to request 
signed versions of these files. However, if it does, the web server would 
automatically generate and return additional signed versions in the /lib/signed 
directory. 

Any visitor to the web site is eligible to request those JARs. However, *only 
authorized users* are allowed to push the unsigned JARs out to the server, 
because only authorized users are allowed to update ASF site content. In other 
words, putting files in /lib isn't necessarily making a request to sign the 
JARs - it is simply deploying an update to a project site that happens to 
contain JARs. Those JARs may later be signed, as needed, by the web server. It 
is analogous to deploying a set of HTML pages to a web server that may later be 
encrypted via SSL. Only authorized users are allow to update the pages, but 
anyone can request a page that has been published over HTTPS.

I hope that helps clarify the intent.

Greg

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