On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Toshio Kuratomi a.badger@gmail.com wrote:
On 09/29/2009 11:37 AM, Michel Alexandre Salim wrote:
Hi,
Oolite http://oolite.org is currently undergoing review, and a stumbling block is in its use of its own copy of libjs. An upstream developer is participating in the review and has a clear explanation for the rationale:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=459211
libjs is not exposed to any network interfaces, so the risk is probably quite low -- the alternative is to wait until xulrunner 2.0 is released (the previous stable version has problems in its scripting mechanism and most third-party add-ons for Oolite do not work on it anymore.
Would it be alright in this case to bundle libjs?
I would argue no. The guidelines are written to apply to all libraries except with very limited exceptions to keep this from happening because security vulnerabilities are not limited to network facing code, suid code, or any other class that we've been able to identify. The libz vulnerability many years ago is the classic example of this. Many programs were embedding libz, many statically. When a security vulnerability in libz was discovered, we had to find all of those programs, remove the vulnerable library, patch any code that didn't work with the newer version, and rebuild all of those packages. This is not what you want to do when you are in the time-constrained situation of putting out a zero day update to the code.
Understandable. I suppose the best way to proceed is to continue the review, but wait on the libjs removal for final approval.
And it's probably premature to go to FESCo with this. Firefox does not use the system libjs.so. So you should find out if the spidermonkey maintainer is willing to compile with JS_C_STRINGS_ARE_UTF8. At present the only depending package I see is mediatomb so this might be the best option.
Good point; I'll contact both maintainers.
Also note, it sounds like Oolite is updating to js-1.80 -- that's currently at rc1, not an actual release. You'll need to work with the js maintainer and make sure that that is okay as well.
Worse come to worse, we can stay at the last version that support js-1.70, and probably ask the js maintainer to update Rawhide to 1.80-pre, now that F-12 branching has occured?
Thanks, Toshio and Jon, for the inputs.