This seems like a flashback to the xscreensaver fights with Debian of yore, given that the entire fight seems to distill to "OBS is shipping EOL Qt because of unfixed regressions in newer Qt, Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect and repackaged it with newer Qt, which, as described, breaks things." [1] For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against…
Don't link to this guy's site. He has a serious personal problem with every reader of HN (including the vast majority he's never met and knows nothing about) and serves an NSFW image to anybody that has this site in the referrer request header.
The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action
111–120 of 229 posts
Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably they are looking for more than the 2 lines in the image that don't explain anything about why .
The lines do explain why, from the horse's mouth. I don't know what value-add you'd expect from an "article" - an interview with jwz?
Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action
#113This seems like a flashback to the xscreensaver fights with Debian of yore, given that the entire fight seems to distill to "OBS is shipping EOL Qt because of unfixed regressions in newer Qt, Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect and repackaged it with newer Qt, which, as described, breaks things." [1] For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against…
This grossly understates the problem.
The debian xscreensaver package was years old, and contained bugs related to screen locking which were an actual security issue.
Your comment is in very poor taste.
Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't trying to suggest I thought OBS was in the wrong here, to be clear, just that the debate between maintainers and developers, and not wanting to get bugs for things that were external, reminded me of that exchange. There's plenty of other examples, of course - one that springs to mind was when Ubuntu shipped a patch of their own design in OpenZFS that caused data loss, and it got reported to upstream.
To be fair, not necessarily singling out your comment: I've seen mixed sentiment around the net. I think the characterization of the threats as being "legal threats" makes people more prone to see this as the OBS project being vexatious, but it seems like it's more a last resort to get Fedora to even pay attention. And credit to Fedora, it looks like they're working quickly to fix the problem now. It's pretty obvious…
So stupidity then.
Seems legit.
Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I can tell reading the pagure.io thread ( https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/463#comment-95541... ) the claim from Fedora is that is that OBS is using an EOL qt. It's hard to follow exactly what the issues are with the Fedora flatpak but I can only assume they forcefully updated qt and that's what caused the issues (just a guess from the context). There's a lot of interesting debate in the linked th…
> the claim from Fedora is that is that OBS is using an EOL qt. what's amazing with this is that if for instance OBS had written their own toolkit from scratch just for the app, which by a stroke of luck ended up being exactly the same code than the Qt version they're using and which solves the use case they have - maybe it would be OBSObject or OBSString instead of QObject / QString, then this entire issue would not…
First, the risk is higher. When a vulnerability has a public patch, it means the nature of the vulnerability is also public. Sometimes there is even public exploit code. While attackers sometimes find their own vulnerabilities (zero-days), it makes their job a lot easier if they can just use an already-known vulnerability.
Second, if the code was part of the OBS project, then anyone reporting security bugs in the code would report them to OBS. OBS would then be able to quickly release a security update if they decided the issue warranted it. But since Qt is external, security bugs will be reported to Qt, and it’s unlikely anyone from OBS will hear about these reports. So there is no process for the project to respond with quick fixes even for severe issues. That is, unless they have someone watching the list of CVEs - but that seems unlikely.
Third, if the OBS project had written the code, then it would be reasonably likely that someone on the project knew the code well enough to properly maintain it over time. This isn’t always true. Sometimes projects are stuck with huge piles of code that nobody wants to touch, whose author has left the project, or perhaps just forgotten how it works. But it’s true more often than not. In contrast, most projects don’t engage with their dependencies’ source code to such an extent, especially not for something as huge as Qt.
Fourth, on a related note, vulnerabilities often come from newly written code. Probably the biggest reason for this is that security bugs often double as regular bugs, causing crashes or other issues for normal users. This isn’t true for all security bugs: a decent chunk of them have very specific triggering conditions that are essentially impossible to produce by accident. But it’s true for many. If OBS really had left the code untouched for 5 years, then that would probably be because the code worked pretty well. Maybe it’s legacy, maybe it’s not well-maintained, but if the issues it’s causing were really bad, someone would have gone in and fixed it. That in turn reduces the chance of security bugs somewhat. In reality, OBS actually is regularly updating Qt and thus pulling in new code that may not be well tested. (But not regularly enough to be up-to-date with security fixes.)
Fifth… at the risk of sounding entitled, it’s not just about the risk but also about the potential upside. If there are security bugs in OBS-specific code, that’s bad, but all the ways to improve the situation involve doing OBS-specific hard work. With Qt, there is already someone else doing the job of finding and fixing security vulnerabilities; OBS “only” has to pull in the fixes. In practice, of course, it’s more complicated than that. But if we have a system where it’s Hard to pull in security fixes that someone else has found, well, maybe that’s not OBS’s fault, but that does mean it’s a bad system. We should aspire to do better.
Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action
#116This seems like a flashback to the xscreensaver fights with Debian of yore, given that the entire fight seems to distill to "OBS is shipping EOL Qt because of unfixed regressions in newer Qt, Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect and repackaged it with newer Qt, which, as described, breaks things." [1] For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against…
I don't understand what the big deal was there. Debian has its own bug tracker for all of its packages so the distro maintainers get bothered about bugs in old packages shipped by the stable version of Debian rather than upstream developers. JWZ decided to voluntarily subscribe to the Debian bug tracker for his package and then add a nag screen and start a flame war over them shipping an old version.
Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action
#117This seems like a flashback to the xscreensaver fights with Debian of yore, given that the entire fight seems to distill to "OBS is shipping EOL Qt because of unfixed regressions in newer Qt, Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect and repackaged it with newer Qt, which, as described, breaks things." [1] For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against…
Aforementioned image for those who are curious: https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png
Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action
#118This seems like a flashback to the xscreensaver fights with Debian of yore, given that the entire fight seems to distill to "OBS is shipping EOL Qt because of unfixed regressions in newer Qt, Fedora views shipping EOL Qt as unjustifiable neglect and repackaged it with newer Qt, which, as described, breaks things." [1] For those who don't have that in their context - jwz got very upset at people reporting bugs against…
I don't understand what the big deal was there. Debian has its own bug tracker for all of its packages so the distro maintainers get bothered about bugs in old packages shipped by the stable version of Debian rather than upstream developers. JWZ decided to voluntarily subscribe to the Debian bug tracker for his package and then add a nag screen and start a flame war over them shipping an old version.
Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action
#119The package was already updated before this post was made: https://src.fedoraproject.org/flatpaks/obs-studio/history/co... which reads: ``` end-of-life: The Fedora Flatpak build of obs-studio may have limited functionality compared to other sources. Please do not report bugs to the OBS Studio project about this build. ```
Honestly, the flatpak should be made on only published by the project maintainers; I do not understand why someone still puts efforts into a Fedora-based flatpak to publish the application. Who understand better how the application works? I had this discussion with several packagers on the project, and they insist on their work. I do not understand why a Debian or Fedora packager would know better how to do this. It…
In another comment someone says that most of the extra packages are maintained by a single person (more than 700), there's no way a single person can validate and test all these packages (or even use them).
Re: The OBS Project is threatening Fedora Linux with legal action
#120When I open Software I always think it's going to be a clean GTK interface for dnf. But it appears to just do its own thing, and I've learned not to trust the app listings in there.