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> If you consider that to be a problem I do consider it to be a problem, but since reality is problematic I think policies that force people to rebuild all bin

by mjg59 11y ago

> If you consider that to be a problem I do consider it to be a problem, but since reality is problematic I think policies that force people to rebuild all binaries before they can redistribute them are harmful. > How do you know that the source code provided actually corresponds to the binaries unless you compile them yourself[ with a toolchain you compiled yourself [...]]? I don't, but I also don't have a verifiable path to bootstrapping a toolchain. I trust that Canonical haven't backdoored their packages. > You might be more effective trying to deal with the overall distribution of how software is done rather than imperfections in community leaders. I'm interested in it being straightforward for people to produce modified derivatives of the market leader, ie Ubuntu. I can achieve that in two ways: 1) Helping convince Canonical to change their IP policy 2) Helping convince Canonical to rearchitect their entire distribution infrastructure (1) strikes me as being easier, so that's what I've chosen to work on.

pekk 11y ago
If you are looking at some repository for Ubuntu's source code, and find that their build process isn't perfectly documented as regards the version of gcc they use, that really isn't a GPL violation no matter how hard you try to claim that it is. You don't have a moral right to base a distribution on binaries produced by some other distribution. Unless you are going to produce actual evidence of a legal violation you really don't have anything here.
- mjg59 11y ago
  Not sure whether this was aimed at me, but I don't believe that having source be difficult to build is a GPL violation.
ryao 11y ago
> I don't, but I also don't have a verifiable path to bootstrapping a toolchain. I trust that Canonical haven't backdoored their packages. You do not need a verifiable path to bootstrapping a toolchain to reduce surface area of attack to just the toolchain. That being said, you could try building Clang with GCC and then GCC with Clang (or vice versa) to break any exploits designed to persist in either one indefinitely unless you are the victim of a really special hypothetical attack that targets both simultaneously, although I imagine you could interleave multiple GCC and Clang versions to make such an attack even harder to pull off or even add more compilers to the mix like EKOPath. That should reduce the attack surface area to binutils.
- mjg59 11y ago
  And this would still only buy me something if Canonical are backdooring their packages, which I don't think they are. It's a huge amount of extra effort for what is (as far as I'm concerned) zero benefit.
  - ryao 11y ago
    That assumes that anyone interested in putting backdoors into Canonical's packages never gets a job making their packages. If you are really concerned having trustworthy systems, you need to build from source and if you doing that anyway, you might as well just use the binaries built from source.

by mjg59 11y ago

pekk 11y ago

If you are looking at some repository for Ubuntu's source code, and find that their build process isn't perfectly documented as regards the version of gcc they use, that really isn't a GPL violation no matter how hard you try to claim that it is. You don't have a moral right to base a distribution on binaries produced by some other distribution. Unless you are going to produce actual evidence of a legal violation you really don't have anything here.

mjg59 11y ago
Not sure whether this was aimed at me, but I don't believe that having source be difficult to build is a GPL violation.

ryao 11y ago

> I don't, but I also don't have a verifiable path to bootstrapping a toolchain. I trust that Canonical haven't backdoored their packages. You do not need a verifiable path to bootstrapping a toolchain to reduce surface area of attack to just the toolchain. That being said, you could try building Clang with GCC and then GCC with Clang (or vice versa) to break any exploits designed to persist in either one indefinitely unless you are the victim of a really special hypothetical attack that targets both simultaneously, although I imagine you could interleave multiple GCC and Clang versions to make such an attack even harder to pull off or even add more compilers to the mix like EKOPath. That should reduce the attack surface area to binutils.

mjg59 11y ago
And this would still only buy me something if Canonical are backdooring their packages, which I don't think they are. It's a huge amount of extra effort for what is (as far as I'm concerned) zero benefit.
- ryao 11y ago
  That assumes that anyone interested in putting backdoors into Canonical's packages never gets a job making their packages. If you are really concerned having trustworthy systems, you need to build from source and if you doing that anyway, you might as well just use the binaries built from source.