Re: Abstract FilePath Proposal

On 07/05/2015 08:40 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Bardur Arantsson wrote:

...

How often have security issues with GHC (or the base libraries) itself been a problem? (In practice, I mean.)

Not that often, but consider one real example: aeson was found to have a DDoS bug which was fixed by making it depend on a package which IIRC needed a newer base, so the fix couldn't be backported to versions of aeson compatible with older base. The necessary fix for those would have been substantially more complicated.

(There are other examples, but the primary one that actually involves something shipped with ghc is never going to be fixed until it destroys someone's system, and I bet even then we'll get another load of HOMG MUST NEVER CHANGE API ONLY DOCUMENT AS BAD from the maintainer. I'm still waiting for one of the Linux distributions to notice and CVE it.)

Oh, yeah, that's a valid point... but is this something that should drive design? Further, I don't think the aeson DDoS problem was predicated on an old/obsolete "base" library? Maybe I'm wrong about that, and I'm sure y'all will be happy to point out where and why. :) Regards,