Comment 25 for bug 1878234

Here is what I believe are objective criteria for a fix:

1. Must address the issue immediately
2. Must not remove or break existing functionality
3. If there is a conflict between 1 and 2, provide an option to restore functionality.
4. Be easy to use, well documented, idiot-proof, good looking and planet-friendly.

Point 1 is the reason for my comments about this being an emergency, and rejecting the characterisation of "jumping to a solution".

Point 2 is the reason why I disagree with Tao. The "fix" to a problem like this is not to unilaterally and without public discussion remove a feature that actual production systems may rely on. Irrespective of whether this feature was reasonable to start with or not (we may debate on this later), the undisputed fact is that this feature is there right now, so a fix that would just disable all annotations is actually a risk more than a solution (notably, the risk that folks will not upgrade because we broke their use case).

Point 3 is the reason why I disagree with Fabiano. Until someone can prove to me that there is no QE system somewhere dropping nightly builds of qemu in a known location and testing them through an annotation, I'm reluctant to not being able to offer some wildcarding mechanism. This is the reason I immediately agreed with Tao's initial wildcarding suggestion, not some dark wish to over-engineer things ;-) Like for point 2, failing to provide a fall-back mechanism is a risk, because it may prevent some people from accepting the fix.

I fully appreciate and understand the points made by both Tao and Fabianno, and I want to have this discussion. However, IMHO, that discussion must happen in public and only once the hole has been plugged. For now, I'd rather have eyes on the proposed fix, not some bike shedding.

Therefore, I submit to the court that the only relevant question right now is whether my fix makes systems secure again *by default*. We can debate later how to make it easier to configure or how to protect lower-risk annotations, or even debate about the whole annotation thing, RBAC, etc.

Also, nobody answered my question about CVEs ;-)