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Re: "The Most Dangerous Code in the World"

From: Alessandro Ghedini <al3xbio_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2012 19:01:48 +0100

On dom, ott 28, 2012 at 06:11:37 +0100, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Oct 2012, Alessandro Ghedini wrote:
>
> >>See my attached patch that does exactly this. As this *will*
> >>cause one or two legitimate users get an error I'm very
> >>interested in further feedback.
> >
> >Could this be preceded by a graceful transition period, in which
> >e.g. libcurl prints a big warning?
>
> libcurl can't print any effective warnings. It can show warnings in
> debug output and it can return errors. I don't see how adding a
> warning in the debug output will make _any_ user change behavior.
> These users are already basically doing bad copy and paste
> programming and I don't think they would notice such a thing.

Yes, I meant debug mode, and thinking about this, it wasn't really a good idea.

> But the point of this change would larger be to CAUSE the problems
> on purpose since hardly any of the users would actually like this
> option to be used in production code.
>
> The idea is to treat 1 for this option to be a bug and we now fix that bug.

The problem, from my "Debian maintainer of curl" point of view, is that I cannot
upload a new curl version knowing that it will break something hoping that
someone, some day will notice the breakage. I have to make sure that the packages
affected by this change still work (or have them fixed, or at least notify the
respective maintainers) and this requires time.

Now, I could just not upload the new curl version for days/weeks/months until
I finish this work which is fine, but it will make Debian's curl version to be
outdated for a while and I'd like to avoid this. The configure flag would allow
me to upload new curl versions with this change disabled, and at the same time
do all the testing needed with a curl with the change enabled.

To make this clear, the change can and should be enabled by default, I just
would like a way to disable it temporarily on Debian.

Also, I understand that this may require more maintainance on your part (and
probably some ugly code) and I won't cry if you just say no, but I want you to
understand my concern.

Cheers

-- 
perl -E '$_=q;$/= @{[@_]};and s;\S+;<inidehG ordnasselA>;eg;say~~reverse'

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Received on 2012-10-28