https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=806628
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=806628#c12
--- Comment #12 from L. A. Walsh 2013-03-11 09:54:27 PDT ---
Why is there a pressing need to maintain a 5 year old patch against a new
version where it is no longer applicable.
The patch **admittedly** was to fix a problem that only occurred on SuSE linux
where a hang or SEGV happened.
One has to ask, why was this a problem only on SuSE?? The likely answer is
some other SuSE-only patch, possibly in a linked library, where Suse has
changed the normal behavior.
This isn't the first time I've seen a suse patch change standard behavior based
on the developer's whimsy. It happens often enough, that when I first
mentioned this problem on the Bash list, a response indicated that I shouldn't
be surprised by non-standard behavior given that I was running Suse.
The justification for adding the patch was a suse-only bug. Then the first
justification for not removing it 5 years later, was that even though the bug
was no longer present in the current version, the code might protect against
future problems of the same type -- a horrible reason to patch an upstream
product and a good reason to never get rid of any patches and end up with code
that acts nothing like people expect upstream products to behave.
Now it's being justified that it should be kept on the specious claim that it
doesn't strictly go against POSIX requirements -- ignoring the fact that it
shouldn't have been necessary in the first place, and the fact that it is no
longer needed.
Adding injury to malpractice, if the user is running under rsh or rbash, and
excutes a header script, their shell is reset. allowing them access to an
unrestricted shell.
What research is needed to verify that other than trying it with a simple test
case, I don't know, but as Werner and others don't think it's a problem, maybe
he's right, and escalation of privilege out of a restricted shell isn't
regarded as a security problem. I'll have to ask around...
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