[Release-testers] Automating the releases a bit better.

[Tobias Hieta via Release-testers]

Hello,

Me and Tom was talking yesterday about a way to automate and reduce
the manual work that goes into getting the release testers builds into
github.

Currently the release testers build the distribution, uploads it to
the sftp and then sends a email with the SHA-256 to Tom. Tom then
verifies the files against the sha, signs them with pgp and uploads
them to github.

This is a pretty labor intensive procedure and makes it so that
release artifacts can lag quite a bit, depending on how much time Tom
has available.

I have two ideas on how to make this less annoying:

* We could have the release testers upload a .sha256 file together
with the distribution that contains a single line with the expected
hash. We could then write a script that takes the sha, compares it and
if it's correct signs it with the release key and uploads to github.
This can either be automated to run on a cron schedule or something
that Tom runs manually on his machine. The downside to this method is
that we remove the separate channel for the sha256 transmission. So if
someone would want to upload a malicious build he would "only" need to
gain access to the sftp. I am not that worried about that at this
moment, but something to consider.

* The other more secure option is that the release testers actually
sign the binaries with their own key. These key identities could be
then be send async to Tom and now the script would check the signature
against the list of known testers. This would solve any point of
origin problems. But it would require a bit more on the release
testers side. For my part I think it might be worth doing this, we
could even write a script that could automate this on the testers side
as well.

I direct this question to the testers and the community at whole, what
do you guys think about the extra work and the security tradeoffs
here?

Thanks,
Tobias