Re: Needed: tooling to detect references to buggy */stable packages (was: Re: [PATCHES] ImageMagick security updates without grafting)

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> writes:

> Earlier, I wrote:
>> One thing to be very careful about is to only use 'gtk-doc/stable',
>> 'dblatex/stable', and 'imagemagick/stable' in native-inputs, and
>> moreover to make sure that no references to these */stable packages
>> remain in any package outputs.
>>
>> Of course, if any package retains references to its 'native-inputs',
>> that's always a bug, but I wouldn't be surprised if such bugs exist in
>> Guix.  Such bugs might be relatively harmless now (except when
>> cross-compiling), but they could become a security bug if a package
>> retains a reference to 'imagemagick/stable'.
>
> It occurs to me that we will need some tooling to ensure that no
> references to these buggy "*/stable" packages end up in package outputs
> that users actually use.  Otherwise, it is likely that sooner or later,
> a runtime reference to one of these buggy packages will sneak in to our
> systems.

The gnu-build-system takes a keyword #:disallowed-references that could
be used here.

-- 
Ricardo