preservation of signed rpms

["Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche@redhat.com>]

Hi -

Recently, fedora koji has started applying per-file (IMA) signatures
to RPMs it has built.  This is in addition to the overall GPG
signature of the RPM payload as a whole.  While this extra capability
is not yet fully developed in userspace, we do have one ready user
(elfutils debuginfod [1]), which is unfortunately frustrated by a
policy in the koji code base.

That policy problem is the periodic pruning of signed RPMs.  That is,
"koji prune-signed-copies" is run on the fedora infra every now and
then.  This operation nukes data/signed/KEYHEX/ARCH/N-V-R.rpm files.
While it leaves behind data/sigcache/ARCH/*, those files appear not to
include the IMA signature content.  That means the IMA signatures are
simply lost, like tears in rain.

We'd like to correct this somehow - to make the IMA signatures
available indefinitely - at least as long as the built RPMs stay of
any interest.  (That means: not restricted to the most-recent-update
of a given fedora release.) 

But how?

1) have the pruning operate by replacing the unsigned binaries with the
   signed ones (hardlink or rename)?

2) have the pruning operate on the unsigned binaries, preserving the
   signed ones?

3) preserve the IMA signature content somewhere nearby (sigcache?)
   to give us a chance at finding the data there after a prune

4) ---> some other way? <---


[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Debuginfod


- FChE