Re: [Xen-devel] Critique of the Xen Security Process

[Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2015-11-09 at 15:48 -0600, Doug Goldstein wrote:
>Â
> I'll echo this sentiment as well. Most distro packagers will dislike
> this and need to work around some of this behavior in their respective
> distros.

This is something we have been working upstream to address as well. As it
stands I believe everything which the tools might download can be
redirected to instead an existing component (via one of the --with-system-
foo configuration options) or disabled (via a --disable-foo configure
option). So I think now the current state is that there aren't
"workarounds" but rather "supported ways to disable".

The big outstanding issue is the stubdom build, the distro I care about
most (Debian) simply doesn't build these (for reasons above and beyond the
downloading).

>  Project Raisin is aiming to help with this

Indeed, and it might also allow us to make some of the above options the
default in the future.

Maybe in the meantime perhaps a ./configure --ensure-offline or --disable-
downloads which:
 * either disables stubdoms automatically or checks you've passed --
   disable-stubdom as well
 * either disables all the other things which might be cloned or requires
   the corresponding --with-system-foo=, or has a guess at a default system
   version
 * sets FETCHER to /bin/false

would be useful? (essentially as a guard against new options being required
to turn stuff off).

>  but it doesn't seem
> to have a lot of community effort behind it and it too attempts to
> install dependencies on my machine and wants to be run with sudo.

I believe it has a mode where it simply checks for dependencies and tells
you what is required and thereby avoids the need for sudo, but I'm not
sure.

Ian.

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