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Re: Proposal for how to deal with Go/Rust/etc security bugs



On 2024-01-24 13:29 +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Luca Boccassi <bluca@debian.org> writes:
> 
> > There's always option B: recognize that the Rust/Go ecosystems are not
> > designed to be compatible with the Linux distributions model

Luca is quite right here. Ultimately this can only be fixed by these
ecosystems understanding that software in these languages cannot be
sensibly used in distributions until they support modularity and
stability. The rust people make the excuse that they are 'too new' to
define a stable ABI. That was fair enough for a while, but it's
getting to be quite a thin excuse at this point. I think the real
issue now is that the people doing the work like their 'very
convenient for developers, who cares about anyone else' model so
no-one in that community is very bothered to fix it. People like us
probably need to put in time to help them.

> Go seems to have supported shared libraries since around ca 2015:
> 
> https://go.dev/talks/2015/state-of-go-may.slide#13
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nr-TQHw_er6GOQRsF6T43GGhFDelrAP0NqSS_00RgZQ/edit

OK. So at least they _have_ a shared library mechanism we could
use. Does anyone know what is stopping debian from using it? Can we
just start requiring go stuff to build shared libraries in policy?
I've done this before with C libraries where upstream only ever
shipped a static library so the makefiles had to be expanded a bit,
but it's not a lot of work. Is that all we need in Go, or is there
some larger issue or much more work needed?

> > There are many ways to ship applications today that are much better
> > suited for these models, like Flatpak, where the maintenance burden is
> > shifted onto those who choose to opt in to such ecosystems.

Simply ignoring them until they get a clue would be nice, but I don't
think it's very practical at this point, and would be a disservice to
our users.

But I am certainly in favour of directing effort to try to get
relevant change upstream in the ecosystems. i.e stop chopping long
enough to sharpen our axe. I have done some of this in the Rust
ecosystem, and I know there is quite a lot of corporate pressure being
applied. People keep telling us (@ARM) how marvellous Rust is, and we keep
telling them that it's useless in the real world until it sorts out
the stable ABI/dynamic linking problem.

I guess it might be time for another go to see if we can get some traction.

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/

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