On Sun, 19 Jan 2003, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> engineer knowing these things can save themselves a _LOT_ of time
> in tracking down red herring types of bug reports.
Precisely.
> show "nvidia" as the driver. This is already very aparent, so no
> special "tainting" infrastructure really needs to be in place.
Yes, but it is not very clear -- I'd like it to be displayed at the bottom
of the error message instead of buried somewhere inside a log file. We
want people to see it and understand it /before/ they send "bug reports".
Also, people seem to copy and paste the error message and attach the log
file. It is much faster to skip/give standard reply if the "tainted"
message is in the error message instead of in the log.
> shipping a proprietary driver could use that same tag in their
> driver also, and not be violating the license, since the MIT
> license allows you to do pretty much anything with the code.
Good point -- hadn't thought of that.
> XFree86 would have to change the license to GPL, or add some
> clause to the license in order to implement some form of tainting
> infrastructure.
Would never fly -- and shouldn't!
> One thing that would be a much more useful parallel to the
> kernel's taint feature, would be some form of digitally signed
> modules. Have an option that is off by default in the X sources
> that allows the builder to have the modules all digitally signed
> at build time. This presents a number of options.
Now, /that's/ a good idea. But does it have to be signed? Wouldn't a
good hash (MD5?) be enough?
I agree with you that it should not be used as a security mechanism and
loading unsigned modules should never be blocked.
It only has merit for improving the bug report process, both for the
end-user ("oh, it didn't work and it suggests that I try with one of the
modules it knows about instead. Ok, I'll try that and see if it works
better. And if it doesn't, then I'll at least know not to blame the
XFree86 people") and the XFree86 developers.
-Peter
_______________________________________________
XFree86 mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
