Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Environment Whitelisting

[Marius Mauch <genone@gentoo.org>]

On 08/21/05  Alec Warner wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Was talking with Brian about the build environment and how settings
> were to be passed into the build environment.
> 
> Essentially three scenarios were presented.
> 
> 1)  The full environment is passed to the build environment.  This was
> generally agreed upon to be bad since there are environmental things
> that can cause build problems.
> 
> 2)  The full environment is parsed via a blacklist to strip out
> environment settings that are known to be bad for building packages.
> This leads to a clean* build environment.  However, maintaining the
> blacklist can be a challenge if it grows in size.
> 
> (*) clean, meaining all the bad things we know about are not in the
> build environment.  This does not account for the bad things we do NOT
> know about.
> 
> 3)  The full environment is parsed via a whitelist to get a list of
> environment settings that are known to be good for building packages.
> This leads to a clean build environment, as only whitelisted
> environment settings are passed in.  However, the whitelist will
> probably be worse to maintain than a blacklist.
> 
> Both 2) and 3) above have issues where some build variables are bad
> for ebuild X but not ebuild Y.  I am unsure how exactly to cover any
> kind of situation like that ( and I don't have an example from the
> tree, save perhaps LANG=weird-language ).
> 
> To me 1) is unacceptable and 3) is the best option.  Feel free to
> shoot these down as you see fit ;)

Well, codewise 2) and 3) aren't that different (one is just the
inversion of the other), so why not implement both, make a config
setting for it and get empirical data to find the "best" solution?
Actually don't even need a config switch, just detect if a blacklist or
a whitelist is present and use them then.

Theoretical discussions about this are pointless IMO without
numbers/facts to back things up.

Marius

-- 
Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub

In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be
Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better.
-- 
gentoo-portage-dev@gentoo.org mailing list