Re: Discussion: Base-apt features

[Henning Schild <henning.schild@siemens.com>]

Hi Vijai Kumar K,

that is a lot of points at once, we should probably go step by step
since they are all more complicated than just one bullet-point on a
TODO-list.

Let me start off with a pragmatic "solution" that is easy to implement
and likely to solve a lot or problems at once.

Instead of relying on Isar to get you a partial debian mirror, you you
just mirror upstream and freeze it for a product. You would end up with
a consistent mirror that will contain all you might ever need, all
signed with sources etc. A little big ... yes, but easy.
If you decide to trust in the availability of
https://snapshot.debian.org/ that might also be a path to address some
problems you might be seeing today.

But yes, we probably still want a partial mirroring mechanism inside
Isar.

Am Wed, 25 Sep 2019 13:11:22 +0530
schrieb Vijai Kumar K <vijaikumar.kanagarajan@gmail.com>:

> Hi All,
> 
> Starting this thread to discuss the base-apt features and limitations.
> 
> Here I am listing down some of the issues/features and possibly the
> need for them.
> 
> 
> 1. Support for adding source packages.
> 
> Currently we have support only for binaries. The corresponding source
> files could also be added. 

It goes even further. You probably want the sources for every binary
you install.
+ all the other binaries coming from those sources
+ all build deps, again sources and all binaries
+ recursion of the former

We would have to see how big that gets ;).

> 2. Support for using password protected keys.
> 
> It is a good practice to have the gpg key protected to have an
> additional level of security. Right now ISAR does not have provisions
> to use password protected keys.

Let us put this aside for now, is is technically just something small
on top of signing.

> 3. Support for specifying the signing key.
> 
> Right now, the signing mechanism uses the default gpg key of the
> system. This is problematic in many ways. Especially for CI. In the
> current implementation, eventhough we specify the key, we are not
> really using it.

Did you not have a patch for that "=yes" bug? Anyways signing is not
trivial and we need revisit that anyways.

There are package-level signatures and repo signatures. For the partial
debian-mirror we just need to take care of the repo-level.

All customizations are currently coming out of isar-apt, which is
totally unsigned.

> 4. Support for adding packages only to base-apt.
> 
> Sometimes, we might need a package to be present in base-apt but not
> in the target yet. Things like dev & dbg packages. It would be good
> if we have something like BASE_APT_INSTALL which contains the list
> which would be populated only in base-apt.

I would suggest to have another image to do that. You can do that
today already.

bulky-image_0.1.bb:
require my-image
BASE_APT_INSTALL = "strace gdb"
IMAGE_INSTALL += BASE_APT_INSTALL

Now you build that and ship my-image. I assume that my-image will be
able to apt-get from base-apt later.

If that pattern works we can probably add an example, support-code and
test cases to make that the "supported pattern".

> 5. Refactoring code to consolidate reprepro calls.
> 
> Right now, reprepro calls are spread across the build system. Its
> dependencies are spread across too(Handling envs like GNUPGHOME,
> distributions file etc). My first thought is to have a seperate
> module implemented to handle these calls.

I think that is not too related. The calls for isar-apt are spread and
will probably stay that way, but they should currently not deal with
anything around signing.

For base-apt i envision a post-process task (like implemented today) as
a first implementation. If we decide to build it up on the fly, those
reprepro calls, downloads, signing will shift forward in the buildchain
and will spread like we have it for isar-apt.

Next steps:
- try the idea in 4.
- implement 1 with revisiting [1]

[1]
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/isar-users/base-apt$20caching$20improvements|sort:date/isar-users/_dqKYWUtTa0/velGfVg0BgAJ

Henning

> Like how
> https://github.com/openembedded/openembedded-core/blob/master/meta/lib/oe/gpg_sign.py
> is used for all signing purpose.
> 
> Please add more if you have some features/limitations which needs to
> be addressed.
> 
> Thanks,
> Vijai Kumar K