Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Environment Whitelisting

[Zac Medico <zmedico@gmail.com>]

Alec Warner wrote:
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> 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 ;)
> 

IMO the whitelist is a bad thing.  I would suggest a blacklist and an override list.  The blacklist simply removes known "problem causing" variables.  The override list allows known "problem causing" variables to be overridden.

Zac
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