[bug#42048] [PATCH 0/6] Authenticated channels for everyone!

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Guix!

This patch series follows up on channel authentication support:

  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/41767

This time the goal is to expose and document the authentication
mechanism so that third-party channel authors can use it.  This
should be the last series on this theme in the foreseeable
future.  :-)

The most visible effect is that channel introductions are now
part of the API and shown by ‘guix describe’.  It becomes a long-term
commitment because we want to be able to pass the output of
‘guix describe -C channels’ or /run/current-system/channels.scm
to ‘guix pull’ and ‘guix time-machine’ in the future.

Contrary to what I initially proposed¹, channel introductions are
stripped to the bare minimum: a commit/fingerprint pair (as is
currently the case on master, internally).  I figured it doesn’t
buy us much to have the commit/fingerprint pair signed; what
matters is that users obtain the introduction from a trusted
source, and the signature wouldn’t help with that.  I also got
rid of the idea of rendering introductions are opaque base64 blobs.

In the manual I tried to distinguish instructions for users
(“what do I need to put in my channels.scm file?”) from
instructions for channel authors (“how do I allow users of my
channel to authenticate it?”).

If people have a channel that they’d like to make “authenticable”,
please do try and report back!  You can even test with master,
you only need to add ‘@@’ to access (guix channels) internals
to create the introduction.

Feedback welcome!

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/22883#69



Ludovic Courtès (6):
  channels: Add 'openpgp-fingerprint->bytevector'.
  channels: Make channel introductions public.
  channels: Remove 'signature' from <channel-introduction>.
  channels: Save and interpret 'introduction' field in provenance data.
  guix describe: Display channel introductions and add
    'channels-sans-intro'.
  services: provenance: Save channel introductions.

 doc/guix.texi             | 130 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 gnu/services.scm          |  26 ++++++--
 guix/channels.scm         |  86 +++++++++++++++++++------
 guix/scripts/describe.scm |  56 +++++++++++++---
 guix/scripts/system.scm   |   4 +-
 tests/channels.scm        |  10 ++-
 6 files changed, 269 insertions(+), 43 deletions(-)

-- 
2.26.2