Friday 17 November 2017

Re: Python SNI

On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 08:14:39PM +0000, Lee Jones wrote:
> We want to avoid installing Python from source if possible - we run a
> mission critical system in production and need to ensure that we use
> the version of Python provided with Ubuntu; our view is that this
> version is stable and installing a version from source could lead to
> compatibility issues.
>
> We appreciate that Stable Release Updates policy, however we were
> wondering if SNI could be considered for backporting based on a
> security concern? Over the past twelve months SNI has grown in
> popularity and many web hosting companies have now adopted it. Without
> supporting SNI, it is not possible to verify the common name in the
> website SSL certificate with the website domain.

One thing I'd say is that this does carry a somewhat higher risk of
regressions for users of the package than usual.

When we upgraded launchpad.net from Ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04 earlier this
year, we of course ended up with the SNI changes as a result, but
because it was part of a scheduled upgrade we were able to make most of
the code changes that we had to make to cope with this in advance. (For
example, we now have to tell python-openid about the certificate of our
test OpenID provider in our test suite, which we couldn't do before
because urllib2.urlopen didn't take a "cafile" argument in earlier
versions of Python.) Even with that preparation, we missed a bit and
suffered a regression in production related to commercial subscriptions
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/1688361). As a scheduled
upgrade, though, this was something we could deal with and gain most of
the assurance we needed in advance by running our test suite on 16.04;
it would have been much more problematic if it had suddenly appeared as
part of routine stable upgrades.

The SNI changes to Python are pretty extensive and touch quite a few
modules. If I were in your position, I would instead be organising a
scheduled upgrade to 16.04. (Indeed, I pretty much was in your position
earlier this year - Launchpad is a mission-critical production site -
and this is exactly what we did.) This would bring in the SNI changes
as well as many other improvements; you're going to have to do it anyway
eventually; and it wouldn't carry the same risk of regressions for other
users.

I'm not in a position to answer for Ubuntu's Python maintenance; this is
just some perspective as a user.

--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]

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