Should we stop distributing source tarballs?

[Carl Schwan]

On Friday, April 5, 2024 12:04:28 PM CEST Albert Vaca Cintora wrote:
> It seems a lot of people feel conservative in favor of tarballs, so
> maybe I aimed too far. At least I think the discussion brought some
> interesting points that we can explore further. Some I identified:
> 
> - The tarballs should contain no changes with respect to git, or
> minimal changes obviously justifiable in a diff.

I would argue that there should be no change at all. Adapting the versions and 
adding the version to the AppStream file should be done in a git commit and not 
done in the tarball. This is already done by everyone using releaseme and 
following the steps from https://community.kde.org/ReleasingSoftware

> - Tarballs should only be generated in a reproducible manner using
> scripts. Ideally by the CI only.
> - We should start to sign tarballs in the CI.

I disagree. I want my tarball to be signed with my GPG key stored in my Yubiky 
and not by a generic KDE key. It should be a proof that I as a maintainer of a 
project did the release and not someone else. Same with the upload to 
download.kde.org, while this adds some overhead in the process, I think it is 
important that KDE Sysadmins are the one who move the tarball to their final 
location and do some minimal check (checksum match, it's not a random person 
doing the release, ...).

> - We should start to sign commits and tags. Git recently made this
> super easy by allowing signing with the ssh keys that we all are
> already using to push things, so no excuses for not enabling this.
> Sample config below:
> 
> [user]
>     signingkey = <path to your public key>
> [commit]
>     gpgsign = true
> [gpg]
>     format = ssh
> [tag]
>     forceSignAnnotated = true

+1 git tags are already signed for people following the releaseme workflow. 
Signing commits is also good and I encourage everyone to do it but I wouldn't 
make it a requirement as it increases the barrier to contribution for new 
contributors.
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