Re: [ptxdist] SBOM support

[Simon Falsig <sfalsig@verity.net>]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your reply! I've never used Buildroot, so really good with some hints as to how
others solve this.

>>    My suggestion would be to add a _CPE variable to each package (built from
>>    whatever other variables make sense, typically _VERSION). I managed to add this
>>    for the fast report (extracting it to pkg_cpe in rules/post/ptxd_make_world_common.make,
>>    and adding it to the report in scripts/lib/ptxd_make_world_report.sh), but I
>>    wouldn't be surprised if there are other places/report that need to track this
>>    also for consistency?
>>    Packages that specify _CPE would then have this included in their report, and
>>    there'd be no change for the packages that don't specify it.
>
> As far as I know buildroot [1] already has support for this.  They construct this from
> defaults and override it with several different variables if defaults are not sufficient
> for a particular project:
>
> <PKG>_CPE_ID_VENDOR
> <PKG>_CPE_ID_VERSION
> <PKG>_CPE_ID_UPDATE
> <PKG>_CPE_ID_PRODUCT
>
> And maybe more?  Some quirks handling like this is probably necessary in ptxdist, too?
>
> Greets
> Alex

I see - Buildroot essentially automatically creates the CPE based on existing data in the
package, and that can then be overridden if needed. I guess the benefit is that this in
many cases works directly out of the box without any further configuration - but with the
risk that a wrong CPE is generated.
(From what I can see, ptxdist doesn't really provide any variable that can be extracted for
the VENDOR field though?)

Explicitly specifying the CPE in each package would lower the risk of getting wrong CPEs, as
you'd instead just not get a CPE for packages that don't specify it.

Personally, I'd probably lean towards the latter (rather no CVE than a wrong one) for our
usecase, but would be open to other ways if that can mean getting this upstreamed?

Thanks again!
Simon