[pkg-wpa-devel] [renamed] Debian crda?

[Paul Wise]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 4:42 AM, Kel Modderman <kel at otaku42.de> wrote:

> (Dropped the CC to linux-wireless as it rejected my other attempt to send
> message claiming it was part HTML/Spam. Apologies if you get two copies.)

Maybe you should send plain text email instead?

> I would rather the build process fail if the packager has not prepared
> themselves a priv/pub key pair for maintaining wireless-regdb package or
> else we could end up with a new key pair created on-the-fly and being used
> to sign a regulatory.bin which is not recognised by the currently available
> crda until it is recompiled with the new key in its PUBKEY_DIR.

Uhh, what? Does crda not read all of the keys available in its pubkey
dir? If not, the scheme I imagined is completely wrong. I assumed that
crda would look at /lib/crda/pubkeys at runtime when it starts up
rather than everything being compiled into the binary.

> Instead the debian packaging could provide some documentation/convenience
> code for expected handling of maintainer priv/pub key pairs for signing
> and authentication of regulatory.bin. Attempted to write such stuff here:

Seems reasonable.

> When new keys are added to debian/pubkeys, the crda package needs to be
> rebuilt with an updated versioned build dependency: the wireless-regdb
> package version with the new key(s).

Why is this? Isn't it enough to just install the wireless-regdb
package containing the new key?

> Made an attempt at packaging wireless-regdb and crda after thinking about
> stuff discussed in this thread, the proposed packaging is at:
> svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-wpa/wireless-regdb/trunk/
> svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-wpa/crda/trunk/
>
> Can people please take a good look at this please to make sure it is a
> viable packaging effort?

A review:

Please file ITP bugs.

Circular dependencies are bad, please drop the wireless-regdb -> crda
Depends down to a Suggests.

The wireless-regdb patches look like they belong upstream.

Please adjust the packaging so it works on lenny, you've used some
debhelper/quilt features that don't work there (or in testing yet). At
some point we'll have lennyandahalf and I think a cf80211/mac80211
kernel plus crda/wireless-regdb are an important part of that.

I'm a bit worried about the Build-Depends on tzdata, does that mean
crda embeds the TZ data in its binary and needs a binNMU whenever
tzdata is updated? This is especially bad for TZ updates in stable.
Ah, I see you only embed it in /lib/crda/setregdomain_zone_codes,
which still means binNMUs. I suggest that you send upstream a patch
for doing this TZ -> regdomain mapping at runtime in the crda binary
using the installed zone.tab file when available. Preferably it should
detect when the zone.tab file is updated and reload the mapping and
reset the regdomain based on the mapping.

See my comment above about embedding the wireless-regdb keys in the
binary, which I think is a bad idea.

Please use these as the homepages, they are slightly more specific:

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/Regulatory/#CRDA
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/Regulatory/#Theregulatorydatabase

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise