Re: Scalability of OSTree

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

I think that makes sense, but since a "repo" in our / xdg-app's case
might contain thousands if not hundreds of thousands of branches (some
of our internal talk has been assuming stuff like ~100 new branches a
week), it seems like OSTree isn't designed to work well for the scale
we need.

I think we'll work on an independent system for shipping content to
users. Thanks.

On Fri, Dec 4, 2015 at 7:29 AM, Colin Walters <walters verbum org> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2015, at 03:28 AM, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On tor, 2015-12-03 at 15:21 -0800, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
> > > Interesting. There are other issues with the summary file for us (all
> > > branches being public), and we expect to scale significantly in the
> > > future, so having an ever-growing file the client has to download
> > > isn't particularly appealing.
> > >
> > > Is there anything the summary file does that couldn't be better
> > > approached through per-branch files in the repo itself?
> >
> > Well, the main point of a summary file is that it gives you a way to
> > enumerate all branches on a dumb http server. I don't actually know why
> > we need to read the summary file at all if you pull only a single named
> > branch.
>
> Another intended use case was GPG signatures on static deltas.  While
> thanks to you we do now also support per-object verification, the I think
> it's a lot stronger from a security perspective to do the verification
> before parsing the delta at all (particularly for things like bsdiff).
>
> The analogy is that summary file is like rpm-md (yum) repomd.xml.
> That can be GPG signed, and doing so has a lot of advantages
> over per-RPM signatures (see http://theupdateframework.com/ )
>
> Maybe we could introduce a third variant where the delta header
> is detached signed...but things are already complex in this area,
> and what I'd hoped to achieve with the signed summary file
> was easy to audit and manage GPG signature covering a whole
> repo.
>
> For internet updates, I do think pinned TLS plus per-commit
> signatures provides a good balance.  That would mean for
> static deltas we aren't doing GPG verification, but it'd
> still be available offline via `ostree show` etc.
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-- 
  Jasper