On Sun, 30 Nov 1997, Brandon Mitchell wrote: > I'd also be interested in some kind of verification, so I can accept all > packages put together by some maintainer, and the maintainers on the > debian keyring, but no one else.
I had exactly the same idea in the previous KDE/virtual package discussion on debian-private. I suggest that we add a new control field to our packages called "Origin:" (or similar). This could either be set to "SPI" or "Debian", for example. Then, all Debian packages should be signed with some PGP key (either only one key for the whole system or by the maintainer's key). dpkg could have its own keyring. Whenever dpkg installs a package, it checks the key against its keyring. If the key is not found in the keyring, dpkg stops installing (this can be overriden by some --force option). The default keyring would probably be the developers keyring. The sysadmin could then add new keys of persons/organziations which he/she trusts to that keyring. In addition, the origin tag could be used for special dependencies. For example, the Debian KDE packages can conflict with KDE's KDE packages (which happen to have the same package names). Comments? Thanks, Chris -- Christian Schwarz [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA CS Software goes online! Visit our new home page at http://www.schwarz-online.com -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .