Re: Security lessons from liblzma

> On 4 Apr 2024, at 22:47, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Thu, Apr 4, 2024 at 4:25 PM Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se> wrote:
>>> I don't disagree, like I said that very email: it's non-trivial and I wish we
>>> could make it better somehow, but I don't hav an abundance of good ideas.
>
>> Is the basic issue that we can't rely on the necessary toolchain to be
>> present on every machine where someone might try to build PostgreSQL?
>
> IIUC, it's not really that, but that regenerating these files is
> expensive; multiple seconds even on fast machines.  Putting that
> into tests that are run many times a day is unappetizing.

That's one aspect of it.  We could cache the results of course to amortize the
cost over multiple test-runs but at the end of the day it will add time to
test-runs regardless of what we do.

One thing to consider would be to try and rearrange/refactor the tests to
require a smaller set of keys and certificates.  I haven't looked into what
sort of savings that could yield (if any) but if we go the route of
regeneration at test-time we shouldn't leave potential savings on the table.

--
Daniel Gustafsson