Packaging policycoreutils for OpenSUSE

Discussion:

Matěj Cepl

2018-05-12 12:53:40 UTC

Hi,

I am changing jobs (Red Hat -> SUSE; R&D, but not a security
related job), and although I will be switching my workstation to
OpenSUSE, I would love to keep SELinux working. Which meant I had
to dig into the current situation of SELinux and it is âŠ not
good. So, I started to repackage all SELinux packages 2.7 for
OpenSUSE in my home build area
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:mcepl:SELinux
. So,far I have packaged successfully packages for libselinux,
libselinux-bindings, checkpolicy, libsemanage, libsepol, and
python-semanage. Mostly I use original OpenSUSE packages for 2.6,
but if needed I seek inspiration in Fedora packages.

Unfortunately, I have trouble to package policycoreutils. First
of all, I donât understand whatâs the difference between two
upstream tarballs for it:
https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/archive/policycoreutils
-2.7.tar.gz
(linked from https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/releases)
and
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/SELinuxProject/selinux/fil
es/releases/20170804/policycoreutils-2.7.tar.gz
(linked from
https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/wiki/Releases). Whatâs
the point of confusing users with two different tarballs of the
same name?

Second, I donât understand the behavior of the installation
scripts. Looking at https://is.gd/MivaE1 , why in the world that
installation scripts tons of stuff which is not part of
policycoreutils? Could anybody help me to get through this
obstacle, please?

Thank you for any suggestions,

MatÄj

--Â
https://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/, Jabber: ***@ceplovi.cz
GPG Finger: 3C76 A027 CA45 AD70 98B5Â Â BC1D 7920 5802 880B C9D8
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A GOOD name is rather to be chosen than great riches.
Â Â Â -- Proverbs 22:1

Nicolas Iooss

2018-05-13 11:43:10 UTC

Permalink

Post by MatÄj Cepl
Hi,
I am changing jobs (Red Hat -> SUSE; R&D, but not a security
related job), and although I will be switching my workstation to
OpenSUSE, I would love to keep SELinux working. Which meant I had
to dig into the current situation of SELinux and it is … not
good. So, I started to repackage all SELinux packages 2.7 for
OpenSUSE in my home build area
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:mcepl:SELinux
. So,far I have packaged successfully packages for libselinux,
libselinux-bindings, checkpolicy, libsemanage, libsepol, and
python-semanage. Mostly I use original OpenSUSE packages for 2.6,
but if needed I seek inspiration in Fedora packages.
Unfortunately, I have trouble to package policycoreutils. First
of all, I don’t understand what’s the difference between two
https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/archive/policycoreutils
-2.7.tar.gz
(linked from https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/releases)
and
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/SELinuxProject/selinux/fil
es/releases/20170804/policycoreutils-2.7.tar.gz
(linked from
https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/wiki/Releases). What’s
the point of confusing users with two different tarballs of the
same name?
Second, I don’t understand the behavior of the installation
scripts. Looking at https://is.gd/MivaE1 , why in the world that
installation scripts tons of stuff which is not part of
policycoreutils? Could anybody help me to get through this
obstacle, please?
Thank you for any suggestions,
Matěj

Hi,
After we have discussed about it on IRC (#selinux on freenode), I have
performed some tests on Github to better understand how its "Releases
page" work. The main issue here is that Github shows tags of the git
repository in the Releases page
(https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/releases) and there is no
way to disabled this behavior. This has several consequences:

* Each tarball in https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/releases
contains the full tree of the project (which is why "that installation
scripts tons of stuff which is not part of policycoreutils"), whereas
the tarballs in the wiki page are created by properly splitting the
subdirectories.
* It is not possible to delete what is currently in Github's release
page without deleting the tags.
* It is possible to "upgrade" a tag to a release by adding release
notes and files to them. For example
https://github.com/gentilkiwi/mimikatz/releases uses this (you can see
the differences between "Releases" and "Tags" pages of this project).
When there are releases like this, it is possible to remove them all
(for example using
https://github.com/stevemao/github-remove-all-releases), which
transforms the release page back to a list of tags (I have tested this
today on a test repository).

Moreover it seems that the Releases page can not be disabled (if it
can, I have not found how).

If my analysis of Github's release system is correct, would it make
sense to change the way the releases are currently tagged to only
create one tag (like "selinux-2.8-rc3") instead of creating one tag
per sub-project? Would this break some tools? (If distribution
packagers use tools to automatically detect when a new release is
available, would such a change break these tools?)

Cheers,
Nicolas
(IooNag on IRC)

Stephen Smalley

2018-05-14 13:30:41 UTC

Permalink

Post by Nicolas Iooss

Hi,
After we have discussed about it on IRC (#selinux on freenode), I have
performed some tests on Github to better understand how its "Releases
page" work. The main issue here is that Github shows tags of the git
repository in the Releases page
(https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/releases) and there is no
* Each tarball in https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/releases
contains the full tree of the project (which is why "that installation
scripts tons of stuff which is not part of policycoreutils"), whereas
the tarballs in the wiki page are created by properly splitting the
subdirectories.
* It is not possible to delete what is currently in Github's release
page without deleting the tags.
* It is possible to "upgrade" a tag to a release by adding release
notes and files to them. For example
https://github.com/gentilkiwi/mimikatz/releases uses this (you can see
the differences between "Releases" and "Tags" pages of this project).
When there are releases like this, it is possible to remove them all
(for example using
https://github.com/stevemao/github-remove-all-releases), which
transforms the release page back to a list of tags (I have tested this
today on a test repository).
Moreover it seems that the Releases page can not be disabled (if it
can, I have not found how).
If my analysis of Github's release system is correct, would it make
sense to change the way the releases are currently tagged to only
create one tag (like "selinux-2.8-rc3") instead of creating one tag
per sub-project? Would this break some tools? (If distribution
packagers use tools to automatically detect when a new release is
available, would such a change break these tools?)

Not speaking for the distributions obviously, but I have no objection to dropping
the per-component tags if they aren't being used and are causing confusion.

A bit of historical context: originally, we released the selinux userspace as a single
tarball with a single date-based version. When SELinux was first being integrated into Fedora,
the Fedora packagers wanted releases to be split into separate source tarballs for each component each
with its own independent version, so this was done for formal releases but the source continued to live
in a single source code repository. (This all predates the move to GitHub, of course).
The individual component versioning has limited utility in my view given that there is almost always
at least one source level change to every component between any two releases and there tends to be
a strong coupling among many of the components.

In the past, we have considered either going back to a single source tarball with a single version,
or splitting the source code repository itself to be per-component. Either approach would allow direct
use of the github releases as the official release mechanism and avoid the need to separately create
and maintain the release tarballs on the wiki pages.

Jason Zaman

2018-05-14 14:19:11 UTC

Permalink

Post by Stephen Smalley

Post by Nicolas Iooss

Hi,
After we have discussed about it on IRC (#selinux on freenode), I have
performed some tests on Github to better understand how its "Releases
page" work. The main issue here is that Github shows tags of the git
repository in the Releases page
(https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/releases) and there is no
* Each tarball in https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/releases
contains the full tree of the project (which is why "that installation
scripts tons of stuff which is not part of policycoreutils"), whereas
the tarballs in the wiki page are created by properly splitting the
subdirectories.
* It is not possible to delete what is currently in Github's release
page without deleting the tags.
* It is possible to "upgrade" a tag to a release by adding release
notes and files to them. For example
https://github.com/gentilkiwi/mimikatz/releases uses this (you can see
the differences between "Releases" and "Tags" pages of this project).
When there are releases like this, it is possible to remove them all
(for example using
https://github.com/stevemao/github-remove-all-releases), which
transforms the release page back to a list of tags (I have tested this
today on a test repository).
Moreover it seems that the Releases page can not be disabled (if it
can, I have not found how).
If my analysis of Github's release system is correct, would it make
sense to change the way the releases are currently tagged to only
create one tag (like "selinux-2.8-rc3") instead of creating one tag
per sub-project? Would this break some tools? (If distribution
packagers use tools to automatically detect when a new release is
available, would such a change break these tools?)

Not speaking for the distributions obviously, but I have no objection to dropping
the per-component tags if they aren't being used and are causing confusion.
A bit of historical context: originally, we released the selinux userspace as a single
tarball with a single date-based version. When SELinux was first being integrated into Fedora,
the Fedora packagers wanted releases to be split into separate source tarballs for each component each
with its own independent version, so this was done for formal releases but the source continued to live
in a single source code repository. (This all predates the move to GitHub, of course).
The individual component versioning has limited utility in my view given that there is almost always
at least one source level change to every component between any two releases and there tends to be
a strong coupling among many of the components.
In the past, we have considered either going back to a single source tarball with a single version,
or splitting the source code repository itself to be per-component. Either approach would allow direct
use of the github releases as the official release mechanism and avoid the need to separately create
and maintain the release tarballs on the wiki pages.

I'd rather not rely on the github automatic releases, they have been
known to change over time randomly. Especially for security sensitive
stuff, its better to have the tarballs generated with the sha sums like
they are now.

Having many tags or one doesnt make a huge difference but I dont see any
reason to change either so *shrug*. perhaps we could just put a small
note in the github releases part that links to the wiki page for that
specific release and a note to not use the github tarballs.

-- Jason

Neal Gompa

2018-05-12 15:45:35 UTC

Permalink

As the SELinux stack maintainer in Mageia, I've been through the same song
and dance, and I can answer your questions.

For your first question about the tarballs: The SELinux userspace is a
monorepo, so the git tag archives actually contain all the content at
seemingly random checkpoints. As a consequence of this, the upstream
project has to create the tarballs themselves of the components and upload
them. You _must_ use the the tarball from the Releases page, rather than
the archive ones. This leads directly into the confusion for the second
question. Please don't use the GitHub archive URLs as they lead to weird
things like this.

--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!