[oe] [ALERT] Security vulnerability with recent OE bitbake.conf changes

[Richard Purdie]

On Thu, 2007-05-03 at 15:47 +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote:
> Hello openembedded-devel,
> 
> A commit made some time ago,
> 
> http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/openembedded-commits/2007-April/004912.html
> 
> introduced a hole which may lead to unnoticed security vulnerabilities
> slipping into the packages/images produced. Specifically, it defines a
> random application of a random suite to be used for resolving patching
> conflicts/failures. If you don't happen to have that random tool,
> patching failure will be silently swallowed, leading to any adverse
> effects imaginable - from compile failure to the mentioned security
> vulnerabilities.

Patch failure should not be silently swallowed, the builds should abort.
If they don't, we need to fix that underlying problem.

FWIW, your first solution using SHELLRCCMD won't actually work due to
the way IO redirection is done in recent bitbake. 

Your second solution of adding the DEPENDS is impractical due to the
amount of -native packages it would require.

So we need to find the real problem and fix that, probably somewhere in
patch.bbclass an error code isn't being propagated at a guess.

I will also hint at the use of PATCH_RESOLVER = "noop" which means the
user gets the old behaviour of patch failure aborts the build with no
help from any resolver. It should have always been the default but
wasn't. I'm not sure what the current default is but we can change it to
that if its not.

Cheers,

Richard