Re: [PATCH] gnu: font-un: Add mirror.

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 10:47:38PM +0000, ng0 wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 20, 2016 at 07:44:21PM +0000, ng0 wrote:
> >> This adds another mirror for font-un, this time with tls
> >> enabled. Leaving the sdf.org mirror in the list in case dl.n0.is goes
> >> down.
> >
> > Hi, can you remind us why this is necessary?
> 
> It is possible that it is unnecessary. My motivation was that tls
> enabled source urls provide minimal more security. But we have the
> hash of the file which is expected, so there should be no significant
> difference between those two protocols, correct?

Since we check the hash of the downloaded source file, there _shouldn't_
be any difference between using HTTP and HTTPS.

However, users of HTTP don't have the privacy that HTTPS can provide.

Also, HTTP is unauthenticated, so a man-in-the-middle could provide a
malformed source file that exploited bugs in our HTTP client or
hash checker.

Those are the drawbacks of HTTP that I can think of with respect to
Guix's source file downloading. I'm no expert, so I could be wrong, and
there could be other drawbacks.

> If this is true, this patch was unnecessary.

But, I don't think we should start re-hosting the source tarballs
ourself unless there is no other source. Also, Hydra itself serves as a
content-addressed mirror now.