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Arch rocks: working on untrusted machines

Sometimes you need to do some development work on a machine you don't really trust. I seem to most often find myself in this situation when I'm trying to fix a portability problem by working on an exotic machine lended by some kind person. Another case might be that you're at someone else's house or office while travelling and want to do a little work or fix a bug they're experiencing.

One way you can do this for CVS is to copy your SSH key on, or forward SSH authorization from some other machine. Now, from this machine where you're doing development, you can get checkouts and commit your changes back.

But a problem is that this requires giving access to your SSH key to a machine which I don't really trust to not be compromised or have keystroke loggers. I don't really think it's hostile but at the same time I am not completely happy to let it see a key which allows changes to all my repositories, reading my mail, etc.

Under CVS you can get an anonymous checkout, and then perhaps mail yourself the diffs. It's OK. It's tolerable for small changes, but if you want to do more than one commit then it's pretty annoying. I suppose you can work around that by using Quilt along with CVS.

Under Arch, you can just treat yourself on that machine as another untrusted committer with their own archive. Make your changes, including renames and permission changes, and commit them to a local archive. When you're done, put that archive somewhere where it can be read later, or mail the changesets to yourself. Later on, review them and merge them in. At no point does your SSH or GPG key have to go onto the untrusted machine for you to be able to do regular development. I think that's pretty damn cool.

posted Mon 29 Mar 2004 in /software/vc/arch | link

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