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my first advisory

2008-04-14 by tg@

XTaran mentioned that there is a Secunia advisory for mksh: SA29803. Wow. This would then be my first one. But people really cannot read: the advisory states it appies to “Secunia Product #18328: MirBSD Korn Shell 3.x” — WTF? I mean, version numbering surely is difficult these days, with Linux and related software often having four or more decimal points(!) in them… but I reported it to them using their web site form.

I don’t know why Secunia made this advisory, but I suppose the Fedora person has his hands in there, as he told me yesterday that he needs an advisory for marking the update as security fix in their package system. I told him that this is not a lack of wanting to document, or even lack of communication (skills), but that I merely don’t know how this kind of issues is usually handled “out there”. I haven’t dealt with GNU/Linux any more since I started using OpenBSD back then in 2.9 times, and then, this procedere wasn’t widely used.

Ah, speaking of OpenBSD. They are sometimes not even at fault when a bug report is mis-communicated, even if some people don’t believe it. And they don’t do the major/minor game either. They just still have the decimal dot for hysteric raisins.

Actual user feedback matters. My fork (MirEwe, just to annoy Jonathan) of the Ewe VM now has a fix, or rather workaround: when opening serial devices, “/dev/” was prepended to the device name. Now if users enter “/dev/ttyUSB0” (leenocks) things don’t work — but this is hard to debug. MirEwe now warns and does the right thing. The warning is in there for portability ☺

Ah, and: I could finally log my first (locationless, though) TerraCaches. That makes me an active user of all known platforms. Even if it cost me an entire night of re-reading a book I knew from a looong time ago. But actual caches will follow, and I’m even already planning to plant some myself.

Basel is getting nearer. I’m still not too happy with the option to move away from here. We’ll see — at least I’m going to take a big chance when I see one, and peek into how it is over there. Even if Benny is on Malle.

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