On 12/17/2013 12:36 PM, Ferenc Kovacs wrote:
On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 1:21 PM, Joe Watkins <
[email protected]> wrote:
On 12/17/2013 12:08 PM, Daniel Lowrey wrote:
given that this is a security related change, one could argue that
security
fixes should be ok to go in a minor version, even if they break BC.
This was my thought process. In my mind the RFC is about improving
security
for users who don't know any better. I'm hoping to avoid the "Are we
allowed to break BC?" discussion.
Okay, but nobody is asking the question "are we allowed to break
compatiblity for no good reason", because it's a silly question.
Adding a CA file to the distribution is exceedingly simple, but this is
not
a silver bullet. For example, the Mozilla CA file used by cURL is usually
updated three or four times a year. Even when bundling a CA file it would
only be a matter of time before a distribution's version was out of date.
In the end we can only do so much before users must bear the weight of
maintaining an acceptable level of security themselves.
So then bundle it, doing something is much better than doing nothing,
there are plenty of opportunities to update the cafile with minor versions,
the package maintainers will likely solve the stale cafile problem for us
on the major distributions, when they see we are actually doing something
about it ...
It really does not seem sensible to purposefully break compatibility when
it can be retained easily, the vote is going to be split with no clear
outcome doing no good for anyone. Reduce the options to two if you want to
actually move forward.
That's enough from me, gonna go find something to break :)
Don't forget that bundling a CA file also means that take the burden of
keeping it up-to-date to our shoulders.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it, but if we do then we have to make
sure that we understand the implications.
Even if we take the "easy" path, and select an already existing CA bundle
(eg. Mozilla), we have to make sure to always ship the up-to-date version
and there could be events, when we would need to create a release only
because some CA incident (like what happened with DigiNotar in 2011 which
forced the everybody shipping CA bundles to update their bundle to remove
this CA from it's list of trusted CAs).
As I've said, I'm only stating this so everybody can understand the
implications before voting.