ensurecvs

Purpose

This tool shall help identify commits in current source tree that are

• available remote on the same branch
• available in the parent branch

and are likely to contain bugfixes.

History

When you're using a 3rd party components in your project it's hard to balance between keeping it safe and tested against keeping in touch with upstream/mainline, especially when you have to decide if the code is as safe as possible.

Most would rely here on CVE-notifications for the used component and the corresponding version.

I was watching the 2019's keynote of Greg Kroah-Hartman at Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Lyon where he said, that most issues don't even get a CVE entry anymore, they will just be fixed with a commit in upstream (at least for the kernel).

This is somehow hard to maintain, as mostly you simply don't want to change the feature-set (as this has been tested and approved) but need the bug- and issue-fixes from that project.

That is where this tool comes into play - It performs automatic checks if there are upstream fixes available - and if so, if they only contain fixes and NOT features.

Ensurecvs, helps you to ensure and you're using the best of the used content versioning system

What it does

• It extracts the currently used commit from the local repository clone
  • this can be overridden by specifying --srcrev or --srctag in command line
• It extracts the currently used branch from the local repository clone
  • this can be overridden by specifying --srcbranch in command line
• It gets all remote available commits in current branch
• It gets all commits made to 'master' since current branch has been branched off (an alternative branch to 'master' can be specified by using --upstream in command line)
  • it filters all commits out, that might have been cherry-picked in current branch
• all the remaining commits are classified regarding their commit message
• commits that are classified to be likely bugfixes are presented at the console (STDOUT)

Usage

usage: ensurecsv [-h] [--srcbranch SRCBRANCH]
                 [--srcrev SRCREV | --srctag SRCTAG] [--upstream UPSTREAM]
                 localdir

Ensure that you're using the most secure source code

positional arguments:
  localdir              Path to local repo

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --srcbranch SRCBRANCH
                        Use explicitly given branch
  --srcrev SRCREV       Use explicitly given source revision
  --srctag SRCTAG       Use explicitly given tag
  --upstream UPSTREAM   Use explicitly given branch as upstream

Installation

From pypi

simply run

pip3 install ensurecvs

From source

• git clone this repository
• cd to <clone folder>/ensurecvs
• Install the needed requirements by running pip3 install -r requirements.txt
• run python3 setup.py build install (possibly 'sudo' is needed)

Output

The tool will return

[branch] commit <commit hash>:'<commit message>'  is likely to contain bugfixes

e.g.

[master] commit 173dfc1c07c9fa901a91adbc9bf8fd41961b9837:'Fix compile issue with python-astor' is likely to contain bugfixes

that means that commit 173dfc1c07c9fa901a91adbc9bf8fd41961b9837 currently to be found in branch master is likely to contain a bugfix that isn't yet used in the currently selected branch

Implementation notes

Currently only git-repositories are supported

Future

If you have interest in one or more of the following topics, feel free to get in contact with me

• better commit classification (maybe with something like this here)
• better documentation
• changeset code analysis for better commit classification
• check on out-of-tree patches in local code
• compare the changeset diff for cherry-pick analysis
• streamline code
• svn-repository support

Contribution

Feel free to add issues or pull requests