Bug 7124 - silently changing tarballs is a very bad practice
Summary: silently changing tarballs is a very bad practice
Status: CLOSED INVALID
Alias: None
Product: xorg
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Release (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: x86 (IA32) Linux (All)
: high critical
Assignee: Xorg Project Team
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Blocks:
 
Reported: 2006-06-05 23:39 UTC by Jakub Moc
Modified: 2006-06-06 01:37 UTC (History)
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Description Jakub Moc 2006-06-05 23:39:01 UTC
Folks, you did it again. And it's a really really bad practice. What are
versions for if you keep silently changing tarballs w/o version bump? There are
distributions that rely on integrity checks, like MD5 sums, you are killing
these checks if you do this.

Reference downstream bugs:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135715
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127306

(and a bunch of others).
Comment 1 Daniel Stone 2006-06-06 00:23:37 UTC
wow, speaking of bad practices, we have a bug reporter who:
  * files an incredibly non-specific bug, that you have to chase down a bunch of
URLs for;
  * files it at CRITICAL severity;
  * generally acts like a prissy tool with his wildly non-specific bug.

so, one of the bugs you referenced was from _january_.  looking at the recent one:
-r--r--r-- 1 ajax xorg        1.8M 2006-01-18 15:51 font-misc-misc-1.0.0.tar.bz2
-r--r--r-- 1 ajax xorg        2.5M 2006-01-18 15:51 font-misc-misc-1.0.0.tar.gz
-r--r--r-- 1 ajax xorg        588K 2006-01-18 15:51 encodings-1.0.0.tar.bz2
-r--r--r-- 1 ajax xorg        676K 2006-01-18 15:51 encodings-1.0.0.tar.gz
-r--r--r-- 1 ajax xorg         42K 2006-01-18 15:51 font-cursor-misc-1.0.0.tar.bz2
-r--r--r-- 1 ajax xorg         50K 2006-01-18 15:51 font-cursor-misc-1.0.0.tar.gz

so, would you care to explain to me how exactly you are going to blame the
'changed md5sum' of a tarball last altered in january on upstream, and not the
mirror network or so?  or why you filed a critical bug going 'man you guys are
crap' without bothering to check simple things like this?

and we know that changing tarball contents silently is bad.  which is why we
don't do it.  and post release announcements with both the md5sum and sha1sum of
the tarball, gpg-signed.  would be kind of pointless doing that if we changed
the tarballs all the time.  but hey, thanks for your random rant here, and all
through gentoo's bugzilla.  it was really productive.
Comment 2 Jakub Moc 2006-06-06 01:06:45 UTC
Wow, LOL...

We haven't been mirroring those tarballs for a while (note the RESTRICT="mirror"
in the ebuilds, but you probably can't be bothered to chase anything so you
didn't check) - exactly because of the reason this bug has been filed, so you
might want to check your mirrors, ours are not at fault here.

Thanks for the warm words, ktnxbye... 
Comment 3 Daniel Stone 2006-06-06 01:37:04 UTC
well, either I could install gentoo and find out, or you could just be more
specific, and start including at least the names of the tarballs in the original
bug report.  i'm sure the former is more reasonable.

i'm sure no-one needed actual urls that tarballs had been downloaded from,
either.  that would just be too easy.

feel free to reopen this bug if you have actual useful information that you want
to bring to the table, but bugzilla is not a forum for random uninformed whining.


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