develooper Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from October 2016

Re: Perl 5.24.1-RC4 is now available!

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Michael Schroeder
Date:
October 19, 2016 09:30
Subject:
Re: Perl 5.24.1-RC4 is now available!
Message ID:
20161019093017.GA13004@suse.de
On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 10:52:21PM +0200, Sawyer X wrote:
> > I don't see how you can ship that as a maintenance update.
> 
> I understand it is important to you, Michael, and I respect that. I hope
> you understand it is important to us as well and that is why we decided
> on this course of action. It is our position that security in this case
> takes precedence.

Ok, let me state again my two points. This is all "IMHO", so feel free
to ignore me.


1) For a maintainence update not breaking things should be the top
priority. Some times (like with security changes) breaking some
code can't be helped. But with the current code there's a case where
you break code without need: this is when %{"$base\::"} is empty.

In that case you know that this is not an optional load. So it would
be in the spirit of the rest of the fixes to not remove '.' from @INC.
Nevertheless you do it because of "consistency reasons". That's
not "security takes precedence".

Also note that the big reworded error message is only shown in this
case, i.e. when there is actually no need to remove '.'.


2) The security relevant case is when %{"$base\::"} is not empty.
In that case it is not clear if this is an optional or mandatory
module load. Here I'm fine with removing '.' from @INC, but it is
somewhat risky. The problem is that in this case the code does
not die, it will just continue leading to errors where it is not
easy to find the cause. The "security takes precedence" argument
is good here, but it's still quite a nasty change.

Cheers,
  Michael.

-- 
Michael Schroeder                                   mls@suse.de
SUSE LINUX GmbH,           GF Jeff Hawn, HRB 16746 AG Nuernberg
main(_){while(_=~getchar())putchar(~_-1/(~(_|32)/13*2-11)*13);}

Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About