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Re:Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and ope... by josephg on Sunday December 12, 2021 @04:21PM (#29533739)
You can’t control others emotions. But setting healthy expectations goes a long way.

One of my takeaways from the log4j issue is that the log4j devs should have never accepted the patches to add LDAP urls in the first place. Or perhaps, they should have removed that feature when it became burdensome. I would have. There’s a pressure to accept whatever patches come your way as an opensource developer, but actually, you’re under no obligation to do any such thing. Open source also means the source is available - so people are free to take your code, mix in their patches and maintain it themselves. And if they can’t be bothered doing that, why should I shoulder that burden?

I think us opensource devs should get more comfortable saying no. “I hear that this feature is important to you but it doesn’t solve a problem I (or anyone else I know) cares about. Please maintain those patches in your own fork.”

Re:Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and ope... by xxpor on Sunday December 12, 2021 @04:44PM (#29533955)
They didn't add ldap support explicitly though, AFAICT. They added JNDI support, using a fairly small patch the guy who filed the request wrote for them. JNDI is a standard Java thing, so I'd guess they didn't think too deeply about all of the things it could do (not criticizing them, I'd probably have done the same thing).
Re:Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and ope... by nradov on Sunday December 12, 2021 @04:30PM (#29533826)
Another alternative is to build a stable plug-in API rather than handling such requests in the core product. That way users with particular needs can code their own plug-ins rather than forking the entire code base. Now obviously open source maintainers have no obligation to do that, but purely from an engineering perspective it's an approach worth considering.
Re:Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and ope... by pjc50 on Monday December 13, 2021 @03:46AM (#29537884)
You then hit the two problems that everyone with a plugin API hits:

- you can't rearchitecture your software beyond a certain amount without breaking the plugin API

- if a plugin crashes, people will blame the host, no matter how you attempt to deflect this

Re:Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and ope... by GoblinSlayer on Monday December 13, 2021 @04:48AM (#29538189)
That's what log4net does, and presumably log4j has a plugin api too.
Re:Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and ope... by raxxorrax on Monday December 13, 2021 @06:09AM (#29538549)
Reminds me of Signal and Apple M1 support issue. People expect you to accept the PR. As if that wouldn't mean more work for the maintainer in any case.