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Re: NEW queue processing causes relaxed treatment of security issues



Bastien Roucaries <rouca@debian.org> writes:

> Le mercredi 14 janvier 2026, 10:51:31 heure normale d’Europe centrale
> Simon Josefsson a écrit :
>> Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk> writes:
>> 
>> > Concerns over NEW queue processing apparently is now the direct cause
>> > for lovering severity of some bugs: See bug#1124241
>> 
>> Another approach is to vendor code, pending uploads.
>
> And increase the surface attack to the attack of clone ?
>
> I have an academic paper on debconf2025 about this kind of approach.
>
> Vendoring is bad.

Agreed.  Not solving known security vulnerabilities is also bad.  Which
is worse, if you have to chose?

/Simon

> rouca
>> 
>> Compare 'opkssh' that had a security vulnerability in testing which was
>> fixed in more recent versions, but updating to that version required
>> packaging of two new dependencies that depends on each other.  The first
>> one of those (golang-github-thediveo-success) is in the NEW queue for 3
>> months, and I've been holding off uploading the second dependency
>> (golang-github-thediveo-enumflags) until the first one has been accepted
>> because the latter one depend on the former.  For this situation, I
>> think vendoring is acceptable because we are talking about <500 lines of
>> code that had simple copyright and license consistent with the original
>> package.  Of course, debian/copyright and debian/REAME.source needs to
>> cover this.
>> 
>> For Go packages, the recursive dependency-on-dependency-on-dependency
>> churn is common, as is security problems solved by later upstreams.
>> 
>> I'm seeing this situation for several packages.  Getting all the
>> recursive dependencies into the archive to allow upgrading Sigstore's
>> 'cosign' to the non-vulnerable 3.x series will not be possible before
>> forky with the current NEW processing speed.  See
>> https://bugs.debian.org/1121251 for a dependency tracking chain (which
>> is not complete, it just tracks some obvious blockers).  For Sigstore,
>> vendoring code will lead to lead to a really unmaintainable situation,
>> so I avoided it.
>> 
>> Also, what is with NEW uploads that doesn't close any bugs?  Couldn't
>> they be auto-rejected?  It is challenging to review and discuss anything
>> when there is no bug report associated with an upload.  There are
>> several "interesting" packages in the NEW queue that I believe ought to
>> have a public fora for discussion, including debian-fastforward (archive
>> signing keys for a non-Debian apt sources) and coreutils-from (altering
>> fundamental tools).  Moving ftp-master discussion with maintainers to
>> the bug reports would be a nice transparency improvement IMHO.  I never
>> understood why the discussion with ftp-masters about package uploads are
>> conducted in private, it seems contrary to Debian's social contract to
>> not hide things.
>> 
>> /Simon
>> 
>

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