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Comment by flerchin | Hacker News Reader

> As of today only 93% of all Debian source packages are tracked in git on Debian’s GitLab instance at salsa.debian.org. Some key packages such as Coreutils and Bash are not using version control at all

This bends my brain a little. I get that they were written before git, but not before the advent of version control.

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Specifically the packaging is not in version control. The actual software is, but the Debian maintainer for whatever reason doesn't use source control for their packaging.

The author is incorrect. Keeping the packaging files under git is done out of convenience but it does not help for security and reproducibility.

The packages uploaded in Debian are what matters and they are versioned.

And how are you supposed to verify that the right packages have been uploaded?

The easiest way to verify that is by using a reproducible automated pipeline, as that moves the problem to "were the packaging files tampered with".

How do you verify the packaging files? By making them auditable by putting them in a git repository, and for example having the packager sign each commit. If a suspicious commit slips in, it'll be immediately obvious to anyone looking at the logs.

> The easiest way to verify that is by using a reproducible automated pipeline

Conversely, this is also an attack surface. It can be easy to just hit "accept" on automated pipeline updates.

New source for bash? Seems legit ... and the source built ... "yeah, ok."

Actually the uploads in Debian are signed and the build process is reproducible and audited.

Distros do not need to update packages on each and every upstream commit.

> I get that they were written before git, but not before the advent of version control.

  git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/bash.git
  git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/coreutils.git

Plug the repo name into https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=<REPO_NAME> to get a link to browse the repo.

Look at the commit log in the bash repo. What good does it do if it notionally is version controlled if the commits look like this:

    2025-07-03 Bash-5.3 distribution sources and documentation bash-5.3 Chet Ramey 896 -103357/+174007

That looks to be the headline for the public release commit. If you'd bothered to look around for a full sixty seconds, you'd have found that the commits tagged with bash-5.3 and bash-5.2 follow that format.

Here are the headlines for a couple of fix commits:

  Bash-5.2 patch 12: fixes for compat mode leaving extglob enabled after command substitution
  Bash-5.2 patch 1: fix crash with unset arrays in arithmetic contexts

It looks like discussion of the patches happens on the mailing list, which is easy to access from the page that brought you to the repo browser.

Ahh yes, if only the commit message was better. That would have stopped the xz attack.

It's not just the commit message, but the fact that it's a single commit with >100k lines changed (though, if that's just a merge commit, it might be not super unusual for that kind of workflow. Though big merge commits are a good place to hide things in git, given that they can introduce their own changes)

> It's not just the commit message, but the fact that it's a single commit with >100k lines changed

When you diff the `bash-5.3` tag against the `bash-5.3-rc2` tag, the set of changes is reduced by a ton. It's the same story with previous release commits (at least for as far as I care to go back)... there's a "next version" branch that gets tagged with alpha, beta, and rc releases, and then there's a release commit that's made on master with the changes from the "next version" branch, plus some additional changes.

Why do they do things this way? I have no idea, but it clearly seems to work for them.

Because historically, what's in a release tarball is not what's in the repository. In many cases, the release tarball of an old C/autoconf project has "half-built". Debian has always worked from the release tarballs, and thus if you "just" import Debian packaging into a VCS, you don't necessarily track every upstream commit, just the releases.

(Independently importing release tarballs into VCS also worked better in the era of a dozen competing VCSes, without reliable export-import pipelines.)

I think you're either confused, or have attached your comment to the wrong parent?

My observations and questions were about the GNU bash git repo and how (and why) the bash maintainers do release branching and tagging. They were not about how the Debian folks handle their packaging.

Oh yeah. The thread before that talked about Debian packaging.

This is the upstream source control. The article talks about the Debian packaging source not being in git (on e.g. salsa.debian.org).

Eh, I didn't bother to read TFA. So, it was ambiguous as to whether OP was talking about the projects or Debian's packages of the same. I figured it was more likely that OP was talking about the projects and proceeded accordingly.

If that quote's about keeping Debian packaging in source control, I don't really see much benefit for packages like coreutils and bash that generally Just Work(TM) because they're high-quality and well-tested. Sign what you package up so you can detect tampering, but I don't see you really needing anything else.

Also why couldn't they start using it now?

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