Subject: bug#27943: tar complains about too-long names (guix release)

From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2017 18:12:20 -0500

> On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 02:55:52PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > I thought about it, but since it’s an unsual case, what about adding a
> > special property to packages instead?  You’d write:
> > 
> >   (package
> >     ;; …
> >     (properties '((fixed-vulnerabilities "CVE-123-4567" "CVE-123-4568"))))
> > 
> > ‘guix lint’ would honor this property, and that would address both cases
> > like this and situations where a CVE is known to no longer apply, as is
> > the case with unversioned CVEs¹.
> > 
> > Thoughts?

I'd rather the property's name more clearly reflect that it doesn't
actually fix the vulnerability, but just prevents the linter from
complaining about it.

Someone who sees this property used in a package could reasonably assume
that it's required to list all fixed CVEs in a 'fixed-vulnerabilities'
list, and that it is the "single source of truth" for which bugs apply
to a package. But, it would not actually have anything to do with that,
just being a way to silence the linter.

However, I can't think of a good idea for another name...

On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 11:49:01PM +0200, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> I like that idea. It also allows us to mitigate a CVE without needing to
> specifically add a patch. I've attached my first attempt at implementing
> it.

I think of `guix lint -c cve` as one of many tools for discovering
important problems in our packages, but I don't think that we must
absolutely silence the linter. It's always going to be imprecise, with
both false negative and positive results.