New package cvs requests. opt out of cvsextras commit rather than in?

Zack Cerza zcerza at redhat.com
Wed Dec 5 18:17:02 UTC 2007


Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:29:41 -0500
> John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> Linux has been mostly immune to malware. For anyone writing malware
>> one of the challenges is propagating the infected code.
>>
>> So lets not give bad folks the perfect vehicle for distributing their 
>> malware through an official update channel which automatically gets 
>> pushed to tens of thousands of machines with the implication of being 
>> clean software. Such an event would be devastating to the entire open 
>> source community.
>>
>> If one doesn't think this is going to happen or you think the
>> ultimate consequences for open source adoption would be benign then I
>> have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
>>
>> Also, if you think the bar to getting a Fedora account is so high as
>> to make this unlikely then you've forgotten that anyone with enough 
>> software savvy to write malware would view that hurdle as a house of
>> straw.
>>
>> If you think there aren't plenty of folks the world over just waiting 
>> for their 15 minutes of hacker fame or who have a desire to teach 
>> RedHat/Fedora a lesson then I can offer you a discount on that bridge.
>>
>> Do we need a better mechanism for accepting contributions from the 
>> community, probably. Are open commit lists the answer, no.
>>
>> If you think the problem would be mitigated by package maintainers 
>> rigorously reviewing all changes *after* they've been committed
>> you're forgetting human nature and the fact most maintainers are over
>> worked to begin with. By extension if you demand maintainers review
>> every commit then how is that effectively different than the current
>> process of posting a patch in a bugzilla and asking the maintainer to
>> review it before committing it?
> 
> And if you think we're the first Linux distro of any size to have wider
> access to our software source control you're also mistaken.  We're not
> paving new ground here.
> 
> Debian has NMUs which allow for a Debian maintainer other than the
> package owner to upload new builds of a package for various reasons:
> http://www.us.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ch-pkgs.en.html#s-nmu

Only Debian Developers can do NMUs. Last I checked the process of 
becoming a Debian Developer was roughly an order of magnitude more 
rigorous than ours (and possibly to the extent of being beyond reason).

Can't comment on the rest of the distros.

Zack




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