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Re: Tons of embedded code copies in library packages under the Debian Security Tools Team's umbrella



Hi Raphael,

Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> this is a clear design choice of upstream and given that all those
> libraries are maintained by the same person (and that he is not providing
> any official API stability), I don't think it's really problematic.
> Also all those libraries are really small.
> 
> Trying to package them separately would be a huge mess. 

This is all very true and would be no problem — if they would be
present only in a single source package. But we're far from that case.

The mess is that these libraries were partially packaged separately,
too (see the mentioned libbfio) or were packaged in a multitude of
different developement states in up to 22 different source package.

So every time there is a security issue in one of these libraries, the
security team will have to check all the libyal-originating source
packages, check if the affected library is included and especially at
which version or git commit (but neither is not preserved
with upstream's tar ball building script) they were included in that
specific source package and if they are affected.

I think I forgot to mention this explanatory link in my first mail:
https://wiki.debian.org/EmbeddedCopies

Please also remember Debian Policy §4.13 which states that Debian
packages should not use convenience copies. (It's no "must", otherwise
these all would be RC bugs, but it's still something we should strive
to.)

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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