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Postings from February 2020
I believe that our approach to changes that introduce new fatal exceptions is flawed. As far as I understand the rules we cannot introduce new fatal exceptions. This means that a whole host of fixes for bugs in things like the regex engine can not be backported. I personally find this absurd. In one case we are arguing that making a regexp construct that can infinite loop die cannot be backported because it introduces a new fatal exception. There is some suggestion that making it generate a different, existing error message, "saves the backport". I find this absurd too. Why should a less useful message be ok, but a more informative one not be? Anyway, it seems like there is not going to be consensus on this. But it seems to me there is a way for us to "have our cake and eat it too". I propose the following: Where we find an issue that triggers segfaults, illegal reads, or infinite loops which we solve by introducing a new exception we backport the patch with a define guard like FATAL_BACKPORTS_ALLOWED. This would allow people that want the protections (like $work would) can add -DFATAL_BACKPORTS_ALLOWED to their build args. We could also do this the other way round, and assume people *want* such fixes but provide for a define flag like -DFATAL_BACKPORTS_DISALLOWED, which would disable such fixes. I would prefer the latter, but be more than satisfied with the former. This would allow us to backport security measures which might involve new fatal exceptions and give people building perl the ability to make informed decisions about how much risk they are willing to take when upgrading an older release. It would also IMO reduce acrimony and debate about what constitutes a security issue. BTW, nothing in this proposal is intended to allow backporting low criticality fatal exceptions. I do not believe we should. But I think we *should* be able to introduce new exceptions if they prevent serious problems like infinite loops, or read-overruns, or whatnot. cheers, Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"Thread Next