Comment 15 for bug 1246098

Revision history for this message
Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland) wrote : Re: [Bug 1246098] Re: MIR: pollinate

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 1:37 AM, Seth Arnold <email address hidden> wrote:
> #5 The pollinate.postinst creates a per-installation tag that is included
> in requests. While this is convenient for server operators to track how
> many clients are using their server, downstream consumers such as Tails
> would need to pre-populate the /var/lib/pollinate/tag file before this
> package is installed.
>
> Could the /var/lib/pollinate/tag creation logic be moved later, into the
> shell script, to allow more flexibility in how the tag is pre-populated
> for these downstream users?

This one isn't really possible. The tag is intended to be
unique-per-/dev/urandom-device. Any user on the system can run
pollinate, and if we put the tag creation logic there, it would mean
per-user tags.

The tag is voluntary, meaning that any user can remove, update, or
modify their tag, and still receive the seed via pollinate.

Per IRC:

<sarnold> kirkland: ah, I see
<sarnold> kirkland: well, fair enough, leave it alone. it works.
<sarnold> kirkland: like you said, there are options for downstreams
to do what they want with the tag file after the package is installed.

:-Dustin