On 3/21/2011 9:38 AM, Greg Stein wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 21:13, William A. Rowe Jr. <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
>> On 3/20/2011 7:43 PM, Dan Poirier wrote:
>>> On Sun. 2011-03-20 at 07:47 PM EDT, "William A. Rowe Jr." 
>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> [1] Note particularly that expat appears to be abandoned, no releases
>>>> in almost 4 yrs, with a significant security issue hanging over it we
>>>> patched in apr.  No effort appears to be expended in providing any
>>>> alternate non-expat apr_xml interfaces.
>>>
>>> For APR to continue bundling expat seems easiest, in the absence of
>>> anyone motivated to do something more.
>>
>> I wish we had a better understanding of where expat is headed, or if it
>> is truly abandoned.  It seems strange to rely on an orphaned dependency.
>>
>> Anyone have any inside knowledge or informed opinion?
> 
> I'm a committer on Expat, but (as you've noted) the project has had no
> attention for quite a while. I wasn't aware of a security problem in
> there, however.
> 
> Even if I dropped a new release of Expat, would we want to rely on the
> external build (and latest release being propagated) or continue to
> ship a patched Expat within APR?
> 
> Switching to libxml2 would be possible (it is MIT licensed), but would
> require a lot more coding work in the xml support. Users of APR (1.x)
> also depend on Expat being available, and a switch would require them
> to rewrite their XML parsing code. Maybe that is acceptable for apps
> to switch to 2.0?
> 
> In short: I can make a release happen, but would that matter to the APR 
> project?

Greg, I'm eagerly anticipating releases of openssl-1.0.1 and zlib-1.2.7
to include them in the Windows package.  We won't be moving that target
very much over the course of the 2.4.x lifecycle, so I didn't care to
ship something with openssl 1.0.0 or other stale packages.

I see there is some commit activity.  Is there any hope of an expat 2.0.2
in the near future, since these vulnerabilities have been know for about
half a year or more, now?  I would really love to ship an httpd binary
which includes something more fresh than expat 1.9.7-tweaked.

Bill

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