McIntyre: Scanning for assembly code in Free Software packages

Posted Apr 2, 2013 8:43 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262)
Parent article: McIntyre: Scanning for assembly code in Free Software packages

(disclaimer: I wrote one of the initial tools used to do assembly scanning in Fedora and generated one of the initial lists of packages)

I've called for this to be something that is done on an ongoing basis, by a neutral third party (perhaps Linux Foundation are the umbrella organization). Not just assembly scanning to find upstreams that haven't moved over to generic functions, but overall "adult supervision" of the package set, looking for very outdated packages, assembly code that needs fixing, security issues that are lying in wait, all of that.

McIntyre: Scanning for assembly code in Free Software packages

Posted Apr 2, 2013 10:32 UTC (Tue) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

I understand that it's expensive and hard to justify to management. But it seems like an uncontroversial idea that anyone could do (not just neutral third parties).

Was it controversial?

McIntyre: Scanning for assembly code in Free Software packages

Posted Apr 3, 2013 11:32 UTC (Wed) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link]

Is that a good idea?

I mean, we in the GNOME community do look for and remove outdated options all the time and this "adult supervision" of nerd desktops certainly helps a lot, but for source code?