Re: The direction linux is taking

Christer Weinigel
2001-12-29T19:06:19Z

In article <Pine.LNX.4.43.0112291136350.18183-100000@waste.org> you write:
>If my understanding of the new kbuild and configure system is correct,
>make clean and dep should be largely unnecessary and it should be possible
>to build a patchbot that checks for incremental compilability:
>
>for the current kernel release:
> unpack tree
> build the tree with default options (unprivileged user, obviously)

One thing that should not be forgotten is the risk of trojan horses
here, in practice the Makefile is a shell script, so to apply any
patch and the compile with it would be a bit dangerous. It might be
possible to limit the patchbot to only accept code changes, but
that might remove most of the benefits. Also, I don't know how much
magic one might do with a properly crafted #include statement, such
as "#include /etc/passwd" and then the error message will contain
the encypted password for root (shadow passwords fix this specific
problem, but you get the idea :-)

/Christer
--
"Just how much can I get away with and still go to heaven?"