From owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jun 23 14:56:58 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 780D616A4CE; Wed, 23 Jun 2004 14:56:58 +0000 (GMT) Received: from spike.porcupine.org (spike.porcupine.org [168.100.189.2]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A9BFB43D46; Wed, 23 Jun 2004 14:56:57 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from wietse@porcupine.org) Received: by spike.porcupine.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 95D3ABC07B; Wed, 23 Jun 2004 10:56:56 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <20040622153207.GB1961@empiric.dek.spc.org> "from Bruce M Simpson at Jun 22, 2004 04:32:07 pm" To: Bruce M Simpson Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 10:56:56 -0400 (EDT) X-Time-Zone: USA EST, 6 hours behind central European time X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL82 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Message-Id: <20040623145656.95D3ABC07B@spike.porcupine.org> From: wietse@porcupine.org (Wietse Venema) cc: freebsd-net@FreeBSD.org cc: dwmalone@FreeBSD.org cc: wietse@porcupine.org cc: fenner@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: tcp_wrappers: accumulated change-request PRs X-BeenThere: freebsd-net@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Networking and TCP/IP with FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 14:56:58 -0000 Bruce M Simpson: > Hi all, > > Whilst scanning GNATS, I found a number of PRs relating to requests > for tcp_wrappers functionality and some outright bugfixes. Rather than > commit these as-is, I think we should push the changes back to Wietse, > as we maintain tcp_wrappers on a vendor branch. > > The PRs in question are: > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=bin/31034 > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=bin/32808 > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=misc/36556 > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=misc/42336 > > What does everyone else think? The currently maintained version is tcp wrappers version 7.6 with IPv6 support from Casper Dik. As mentioned elsewhere, maintenance of this code means coping with changing language/system/network environments; it does not mean adding new features. If there is a problem in the maintained version then I will certainly fix it (as you can see from the progression of file modification times). Requests or even contributions for new features receive less enthousiastic response as some may have experienced. Improving warning/error messages is not a big problem for me, however I would be cautious feeding more and more text into syslog() for safety reasons. Even if syslog() itself was fixed years ago, software that processes logfile records does not necessarily handle it well. How much does the maintained version differ from the FreeBSD contrib source code? I haven't looked into this for a long time, having used FreeBSD since early 1993. I would not include regexp support into the maintained version, for several reasons. First, it's complex code, and it's is bound to have bugs. If I work really hard at it, my code still has one bug every 1000 lines. Second, it's unsafe. Most people don't know how to use regular expressions properly, as frequently experienced on the postfix-users list. Even the less sophisticated shell-style globbing is fraught with peril, with good programmers like Rich Salz having to release multiple wild_match() versions because of bugs. Wietse