Re: [Arx-users] register-archive and signing

[Walter Landry]

Kevin Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm thinking that I want to create an alias for ~wlandry named simply
> "walter" (because address@hidden is too hard to remember and/or
> type). That way, I could do things like:
>   arx diff --revision walter/arx.2.1
> 
> Are there any reasons that creating aliases like that should be
> discouraged?

Well, there is no way to create an alias right now.  If you mean just
registering the archive with a different name, that definitely won't
work.  The archive name is embedded into the manifest.  When you
download a revision from an archive with the wrong name, it should
complain that the checksums don't match.

But allowing per-user aliases might be something to implement.

> But I'm using the very latest arx, and the help for register-archive
> says:
> 
> ---
> Record the location of an archive.  You must register the location
> of an archive before you can access it.  If the archive name is omitted,
> then ArX will attempt to read the name and any public keys directly
> from the archive.  If you specify both the name and location, then ArX
> will
> not download any public keys.  In that case, the archive will be treated
> as
> if it is not signed.
> ---
> 
> So would that really disable signature checking? Is that just a
> temporary state while you're working on the signing feature, or do you
> envision it staying that way as a "feature"? 

Maybe not.  I was a little worried about requiring people to have yet
another program (gpg) installed on their machine.  However, I can set
it up so that the only real trouble people without gpg will have is
that they will get lots of warnings when downloading stuff from signed
archives.

However, it will mean that you can't register an archive unless you
can connect to it.  Otherwise, you would not be able to get the public
keys.  I don't know if that is really a problem, since I can't think
of any reason to register an archive unless you want to see what it
has.

Walter