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Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Linux packaging letter
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On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt@work.lexort.com> wrote:
> Is the repeatable build infrastructure portable (to any reasonable
> mostly-POSIX-compliant system, with gcc or clang)?  I have the vague

It's "portable" to anything that can run the relevant VMs.  Uh
provided you don't mind cross compiling everything from an unbuntu VM.
 It certainly would be nice if the trusted-computing-base for gitian
were a bit smaller, thats an area for long term improvement for sure.

It may need some massaging. The tor project is beginning to use the
same infrastructure, so this could be usefully conserved work.

Likewise expanding the supported output targets would be great=E2=80=94 tho=
ugh
in the case of Bitcoin this is bounded by resources to adequately QA
builds on alternative targets.

> Requiring precise library depdendencies is quite awkward.  Certainly
> requiring new enough to avoid known bugs is understandable, but that
> should be caught at configure time and fail.

In some cases packages solving bugs is problematic for Bitcoin.

This is something that it seems to take a whiteboard to explain, so I
apologize for the opacity of simple email here.

From a technical perspective Bitcoin's whole purpose is getting a
whole bunch of computers world wide to reach a bit identical agreement
on the content of a database, subject to a whole pile of rules, in the
face of potentially malicious input, without any trusted parties at
all (even the guy you got the software from, assuming you have the
resources to audit it).

I'll walk through a simple example:

Say Bitcoin used a backing database which had an unknown a bug where
any item with a key that begins with 0xDEADBEEF returns not found when
queried, even if its in the DB. Once discovered, any database library
would want to fix that quickly and they'd fix it in a point release
without reservation. They might not even release note that particular
fix it if went along with some others, it could even be fixed
accidentally.

Now say that we have a state where half the Bitcoin network is running
the old buggy version, and half is running the fixed version.  Someone
creates a transaction with ID 0xDEADBEEF...  and then subsequently
spends the output of that transaction. This could be by pure chance or
it could be a malicious act.

To half the network that spending transaction looks like someone
spending coin from nowhere, a violation of the rules.  The consensus
would then fork, effectively partitioning the network.  On each fork
any coin could be spent twice, and the fork will only be resolvable by
one side or the other abandoning their state (generally the more
permissive side would need to be abandoned because the permissive one
is tolerant of the restrictive one's behavior) by manually downgrading
or patching software.  As a result of this parties who believed some
of their transactions were safely settled would find them reversed by
people who exploited the inconsistent consensus.

To deploy such a fix in Bitcoin without creating a risk for
participants we need to make a staged revision of the network protocol
rules:  There would be a protocol update that fixed the database bug
_and_ explicitly rejected 0xDEADBEEF transactions until either some
far out future date or until triggered by quorum sensing (or both).
The users of Bitcoin would all be advised that they had to apply
fixes/workaround by the switchover point or be left out of service or
vulnerable. At designated time / quorum nodes would simultaneously
switch to the new behavior.  (Or in some cases, we'd just move the
'bug' into the Bitcoin code so that it can be fixed in the database,
and we'd then just keep it forever, depending on how harmful it was to
Bitcoin, a one if 4 billion chance of having to rewrite a transaction
wouldn't be a big deal)

We've done these organized updates to solve problems (as various flaws
in Bitcoin itself can present similar consensus risks) several times
with great success, typical time horizons spanning for months to
years.  But it cannot work if the behavior is changed out from under
the software.

Fortunately, if the number of users running with an uncontrolled
consensus relevant inconsistent behavior is small the danger is only
to themselves (and, perhaps, their customers). I'm not happy to see
anyone get harmed, but it's better if its few people than many. This
is part of the reason that it's a "linux packaging letter", since for
Bitcoin the combination of uncoordinated patching and non-trivial
userbases appears to be currently unique to GNU/Linux systems.  Though
indeed, the concerns do apply more broadly.

> multiple packages is difficult, and runs into A wants only n of C, while
> B wants only m.

My understanding is that gentoo is actually able to handle this (and
does, for Bitcoin)=E2=80=94 and really I presume just about everything else
could with enough effort. I certainly wouldn't ask anyone else to do
that.  If you're really getting into the rathole of building separate
libraries just for Bitcoin the value of packaging it goes away.

> So if you are talking about running regression tests
> with the set of versions of a dependency that are considered reasonable,
> and there's therefore a solution to the multiple-package constraint
> problem, that seems ok.

Running a complete set of tests is a start=E2=80=94 though the unit tests a=
re
not and cannot be adequate. There is a full systems testing harnesses
which should be used on new platforms.  Even that though isn't really
adequate, as it is currently infeasible to even achieve complete test
coverage in things like cryptographic libraries and database
environments.

This is an area where both the Bitcoin software ecosystem and the
greater art of large scale software validation need to mature. You
won't hear anyone applauding the fact that harmless looking bugfixes
in leveldb, boost, or openssl could be major doom event makers

We're not crazy folks who insist on using formally undefined behavior
and argue that it should never be changed out from under us. When
there is a known risk we will boil the oceans to close it even if we
think that the world would be more 'proper' some other way,  but for
known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns we can only adopt a conservative
approach and try to do our best.

One of the middle term things we did was internally integrated our
validation database library (leveldb).  Since we _know_ that its a
consistency critical component, and a part of our system that is
especially difficult to validate, integrating it meant removing a lot
of risk and allowed it to be upgraded with an eye on the
Bitcoin-specific consequences.  Unfortunately distributions have been
patching Bitcoin to unbundle it.  Checking versions isn't adequate
because, at least in other packages, some distributors frequently
backport fixes or apply novel fixes which may not even be shared with
upstream.

Other considerations may drive us out of external dependencies for
many of the consensus parts of Bitcoin. E.g. Pieter has writen an
ECDSA library for our specific ECC curve which does signature
validation >6x faster than OpenSSL (but it isn't obviously
upstreamable due to some differing requirements for constant time
operations), at some point we may need to adopt a backing database
that is able to produce authentication proofs, etc.  Certainly
additional clever tests will make undiscovered surprising behavior
less likely, though figuring out how to get the tests actually run if
they take two hours and use 20GB of disk space is a challenge.

... but today we need to work with what we have, which is fragile in
some atypical ways.  Part of that is making an effort to make sure
that anyone who might create a big footgun event has some idea of the
concern space.

> It seems like a bug that the package will build on BE systems and then
> fail tests.   If it's known not to be ok, it seems that absent some
> configure-time flag the build should fail.

Configure time?  At the moment Bitcoin is built with a straight
forward makefile (though there is a switch to autotools in the
pipeline).

BE isn't currently supported (and I believe this is well documented in
the package).  Fixing this would be nice, patches accepted.   There
was an amusing incident a while back where a distributor was refusing
to take an update that added unit tests because they revealed failures
on BE, nevermind that the application itself instantly failed on BE
and never worked there. I believe that has since been resolved.

> Asking people not to patch should mean willingnesss to make accomodation
> in the master sources for build issues for multiple packaging systems.
> I haven't gotten around to packaging this for pkgsrc - so far I only
> have the energy to lurk (due to too many things on the todo list).  But
> I often find that some changes are needed.  If you're willing (in
> theory) to add in configure flags to control build behavior (in a way
> that you can audit and decide is safe), that's great, and of course we
> can discuss an actual situation when one gets figured out.

I _believe_  (and hope) we've been very accommodating system specific
fixes, even for systems we don't formally support.

I personally believe that portable software is better software.
Portability forces you to dust out nasty cobwebs, reveals dependency
on dangerous undefined behavior, encourages intelligent abstractions
and appropriate testing, and it invites contributions from more hands
and eyes=E2=80=94 I don't care if you use a weird OS: I just want you for y=
our
code and your bug-reports.  So even if we don't consider a platform
worth supporting in any rigorous way, we should still be open to fixes
and build support.

... although we're typical very much resource bound on testing. Our
upstreaming pipeline is often somewhat slow. But it's slow because we
are serious about review, even of trivial changes. Being slow is no
reason to not submit, even if you make a decision to not block on it
(though, if you're doing that you should make the decision in full
knowledge of the potential implications). Like all things stepping up
and being willing to do the work goes a long way to getting things
done.