Re: [Xen-devel] Raisin, was Critique of the Xen Security Process

[Doug Goldstein <cardoe@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/11/15 6:33 AM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Nov 2015, Ian Campbell wrote:
>> On Mon, 2015-11-09 at 15:48 -0600, Doug Goldstein wrote:
>>>  
>>> I'll echo this sentiment as well. Most distro packagers will dislike
>>> this and need to work around some of this behavior in their respective
>>> distros.
>>
>> This is something we have been working upstream to address as well. As it
>> stands I believe everything which the tools might download can be
>> redirected to instead an existing component (via one of the --with-system-
>> foo configuration options) or disabled (via a --disable-foo configure
>> option). So I think now the current state is that there aren't
>> "workarounds" but rather "supported ways to disable".
>>
>> The big outstanding issue is the stubdom build, the distro I care about
>> most (Debian) simply doesn't build these (for reasons above and beyond the
>> downloading).
> 
> Yes indeed. I have been tempted to disable stubdoms in Raisin until they
> are properly integrated in it.

Define "properly integrated in". What work needs to be done to support
this? Until the tooling really makes it easy to use stubdoms then people
won't really use them and improve them.

> 
> 
>>>  Project Raisin is aiming to help with this
>>
>> Indeed, and it might also allow us to make some of the above options the
>> default in the future.
>>
>> Maybe in the meantime perhaps a ./configure --ensure-offline or --disable-
>> downloads which:
>>  * either disables stubdoms automatically or checks you've passed --
>>    disable-stubdom as well
>>  * either disables all the other things which might be cloned or requires
>>    the corresponding --with-system-foo=, or has a guess at a default system
>>    version
>>  * sets FETCHER to /bin/false
>>
>> would be useful? (essentially as a guard against new options being required
>> to turn stuff off).
>>
>>>  but it doesn't seem
>>> to have a lot of community effort behind it and it too attempts to
>>> install dependencies on my machine and wants to be run with sudo.
>>
>> I believe it has a mode where it simply checks for dependencies and tells
>> you what is required and thereby avoids the need for sudo, but I'm not
>> sure.
> 
> Yes, that is correct. Raisin won't try to use sudo before asking the
> user first. That is the expected behaviour, if it doesn't work that way
> is a bug.
> 
> Moreover I would be happy to introduce signature checks on git clones
> and downloads in Raisin.
> 

Does it have the mode Ian mentions where it will just print the depends
out to the user instead of installing them for you?

-- 
Doug Goldstein

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