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Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:41:40 -0600
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From: Jeffrey Ollie <jeff@ocjtech.us>
To: Mikhail Gusarov <dottedmag@dottedmag.net>
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Cc: Not Much Mail <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>
Subject: Re: [notmuch] [PATCH] Use libgcrypt for hashing.
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On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 9:31 PM, Mikhail Gusarov
<dottedmag@dottedmag.net> wrote:
> Twas brillig at 21:28:03 27.11.2009 UTC-06 when jeff@ocjtech.us did gyre =
and gimble:
>
> =C2=A0JCO> Instead of including a private implementation of the SHA1 hash
>
> xserver went this road, and now it has
> --with-sha1=3Dlibc|libmd|libgcrypt|libcrypto|libsha1|CommonCrypto in
> configure.

I doubt that we'll get to that level of insanity.

> =C2=A0JCO> This means less code of our own to maintain and
>
> As libsha1 maintainer I'm volunteering to maintain in-tree copy in
> notmuch :)

That's great that you're willing to take on the task, but as I do a
lot of work for Fedora I tend to think about these things differently.
 It's not about a project here or there making private copies of some
code, it's about tracking down *all* of the projects that have private
copies of the code when something goes wrong, especially when there
are security implications.

The most famous example is Zlib.  Based upon what Google turned up I
see that you've been around long enough that you should have heard of
the problems the computer world had when security flaws turned up in
Zlib.  There's even a project[1] that developed methods for
identifying vulnerable code in binaries the problem was so pervasive.

A more recent example is a cross-site ajax request vulnerability in
the Prototype JavaScript framework[2].  A lot of projects copied that
code into their repositories as well, and now someone has to track all
of those down and get them fixed as well.

When projects copy code into their repositories like this, it makes
things a lot more difficult for someone else down the road.  Both
Fedora[3] and Debian[4] (and Ubuntu by extension), while not expressly
forbidding the practice, *strongly* recommend against it.  I'd really
recommend reading the Fedora page that explains the policy as it has a
great summation of the problem.

[1] http://www.enyo.de/fw/security/zlib-fingerprint/
[2] http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=3DCVE-2008-7220
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries
[4] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-embeddedfiles

--=20
Jeff Ollie