Hi all! For context: <https://tukaani.org/xz-backdoor/> Given the recent XZ vulnerability caught just in time, I wonder if we should take any action in this project to help the ecosystem. Some have mentioned that release tarballs are too opaque, and can easily hide code that's not under git(1) control. I myself have been feeling like that for a long time. I've modified the build system recently so that tarballs should be reproducible byte-per-byte. This means that downstream distributors don't really need to "trust" tarballs signed by me, but they can (and IMO should) generate them themselves by running `make dist`, and they should be fine. Our git tags (and all the commits, BTW) are signed. Here's my proposal: Stop distributing release tarballs, and instead ask downstream packagers to create them themselves by running `make dist`, or even not using tarballs at all; `make install` from a tarball should be exactly the same as `make install` from the source repository (IIRC). Any opinions? Cheers, Alex -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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