Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2021 10:32:15 -0600 (MDT)
From: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>
To: Wolf <wolf@wolfsden.cz>
cc: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>, 
    ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [3.15] System change proposal: Use netbsd-curses instead of GNU
 ncurses
In-Reply-To: <20210407114719.qcup2wefxby523ez@wolfsden.cz>
Message-ID: <222542a7-4875-9620-21aa-e7f169a548f@dereferenced.org>
References: <e12847f2-4cea-c3e8-84c3-e98b92553f8e@dereferenced.org> <20210407114719.qcup2wefxby523ez@wolfsden.cz>
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Hello,

On Wed, 7 Apr 2021, Wolf wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On 2021-04-06 12:17:33 -0600, Ariadne Conill wrote:
>> * Both libraries implement the POSIX curses API.
>>
>> This means, 99% of applications won't need patching and should be basically
>> compatible.
>
> (Incomplete) list of differences at [0] seems to contain only
> hard-to-debug, easy-to-miss type of things.
>
>> new_item
>
> This will just introduce memory bloat since every string in items will
> now be present twice.

I don't think the impact of this is that heavy, and having multiple copies 
of a string is preferable from a security PoV, as it means there's not 
multiple places where a single string can be corrupted with a write.

>> post_menu
>
> Will just not work (and return error no one will likely check) instead
> of truncating (which might be fine for most software).

This should probably be fine.

>> getnstr
>
> Not sure what the implications here are, but sounds like buffer
> overflow.
>
> All these things by themselves are fairly reasonable, however if
> software assumes ncurses behaviour, I'm afraid they will be hard to
> notice since none of them should lead to hard crash, but instead just to
> worse/suboptimal behavior.
>
> Is there a plan to go over whole aports to make sure none of the
> programs uses these functions the wrong way for openbsd-curses? What
> about new packages? I'm not sure it is possible to have some kind of
> linter for this.

It is not possible to have a linter, but as previously noted, other 
distributions have adopted this curses implementation and have largely not 
had problems.

Ariadne