Subject: bug#27462: OCaml CVE-2015-8869

From: Ben Woodcroft <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2017 10:25:52 +1000

Hi Leo,

On 24/06/17 02:41, Leo Famulari wrote:
> Our package ocaml-4.01 is vulnerable to CVE-2015-8869, which we patched
> in the primary ocaml package in April 2016. Unfortunately, this patch
> was not included when the ocaml-4.01 package was created in January
> 2017.
>
> https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-8869
>
> Do we need this older version of OCaml? If so, we need a volunteer to
> maintain it.

Thanks for pointing this out. AFAIK OCaml 4.01 is really only used to 
build pplacer, a bioinformatics program. I was planning on submitting 3 
further bioinformatic packages soon which rely on pplacer, however.

I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to backport patches to such an old 
release, especially since the OCaml maintainers do not appear to be 
either, AFAICS.

This is a little frustrating, but perhaps they should be removed. WDYT?

ben