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To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: RELENG_2_2 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 13 May 1997 07:18:38 +0200."
             <19970513071838.JT48650@uriah.heep.sax.de> 
Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 01:01:26 -0700
Message-ID: <7493.863510486@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> As Satoshi Asami wrote:
> 
> > Did we all agree that this was the way to go?  My observation seems to
> > be that the majority opinion was not to use group (mail)-writable
> > /var/mail....
> 
> I also think we agreed that it was a bad idea from the beginning.
> 
> Perhaps Thomas Roell should hire one of the consultants to fix
> dtmail...

But I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how making dtmail
and/or some of the other mail agents suid root is any *less* of a
security hole and all exchanges to date have, rather frustratingly,
gone something like this:

  "Look, dtmail is the *only thing* which will even use this friggin' mail
   group right now and so making it group writable by mail is hardly the
   enormous security hole that everyone makes it out to be.  You'd prefer
   dtmail to be suid root??  What about things like popper?  How come
   nobody is complaining about such utilities being even greater
   security holes?"

  "Those other utilities should be fixed."

  "Fine, but they've been broken for ages.  Who's going to fix them - you?"

  "No, I don't have time.  But somebody should fix them."

  "WHO, damn it?  I'm not interesting in discussing "potential" here
   since we could discuss taht all day and still get no closer to
   fixing this.  Tell me, what are your plans for actually addressing
   the core issues which brought this whole mess to a head in the first
   place?  This problem has existed for *months* and everyone's been
   entirely complacent about it!"

  "I don't care and I'm not here to fix the problem, I simply don't
   like your solution to it."

  "Well fine.  With your help and a buck, I could probably manage to
   buy a cup of coffee.  Did you actually have any _helpful_ suggestions?"

  "No."

But let me put it another way.  We can back this change out and, at
this point, I'm rather tired of the game of ping-pong which has
resulted from it.  However, by doing this we're going to create a fork
since I *must* to have this problem solved for the FreeBSD Desktop/Pro
release and if there has to be something divergent in that version of
FreeBSD then diverge it will.  I'm not willing to have dtmail broken
in this release and Thomas Roell cannot fix this "correctly" in the
time-span available to him, so the only option is for me to create a
variant of 2.2.x which has this change in it.  Now, I ask you frankly,
which option do you think will create the least confusion?

						Jordan