what do some people's intentions have to do with being honest? nothing? are you suggesting that the weatherman stop reporting today's hurricane location because some miscreant may use that information for evil purposes? coming back to common sense, yes, nobody who is actually able to do damage will grep commit messages as that helps exactly nothing to write an exploit (reading the actual code however does).
Posted Oct 9, 2011 16:05 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
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Honesty is all about intentions.
Kernel.org's road to recovery
Posted Oct 10, 2011 7:57 UTC (Mon) by PaXTeam (subscriber, #24616)
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so you agree that Linus is dishonest since he declared his intentions to cover up security fixes quite clearly. it's a good start :).
Kernel.org's road to recovery
Posted Oct 11, 2011 1:10 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
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He asked not to indulge in a theater of flagging commits with useless (and probably misleading) comments. That is a very far cry from dishonesty.
The contention that such commit messages will make Linux look bad is nonsense, if somebody wants to get data on security problems there are lots of other sources, very much more accurate than self-selected comments on patches.
Kernel.org's road to recovery
Posted Oct 11, 2011 7:36 UTC (Tue) by PaXTeam (subscriber, #24616)
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> He asked not to indulge in a theater of flagging commits with useless
> (and probably misleading) comments.
no, he didn't *ask* anything. he *declared* that he does *not* want to see greppable words that'd identify a commit as fixing a security bug. no ifs and buts there. in less euphemistic words it's also called a coverup. second, if identifying security fixes was 'useless (and probably misleading)' then 1. why does he still let through such commits sometimes, 2. why does the rest world do this? something doesn't add up here if you theory holds ;).