bug#74711: Certificate issues with ‘guix pull’ when system clock is in the past

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

ngraves@ngraves.fr skribis:

> I've found the reason behind the extremely annoying SSL certification
> refusals.
>
> When I use an installation image, the date is not necessarily set at
> the real date.  In my case, `date` was set in 2019, and triggered the
> SSL verification refusal (not yet valid).

Could it be that the clock battery of that computer is dead?  Otherwise
it’s not supposed to happen.

> I don't know why it sometimes doesn't happen.  If we can't
> fix/automate it at the time we boot in the installation medium, we
> should probably add a warning in the manual / a hint in guix pull / a
> proper error in guile-git (that could provide more information than
> just Git failing) ?

The error I see is:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ guix shell libfaketime -- faketime 2019-01-01 guix pull -p /tmp/p
Updating channel 'shepherd' from Git repository at 
'https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/shepherd.git'...
guix pull: error: Git error: the SSL certificate is invalid
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I agree it could give more details, but that’s all we get from libgit2 I
believe.  Worth investigating how this can be improved.

That said, what we could/should do is add a ‘--no-check-certificate’
option to ‘pull’ and ‘time-machine’; it would be handy in emergency
situations like you described.

It should be possible to implement that with the ‘certificate_check’
callback in ‘git_remote_callbacks’.  I’ll see what can be done in this
area.

Thanks,
Ludo’.