It has become clear that SETools has fallen behind userspace in terms of features and general maintenance. We would like to get it to the point where this is not the case, and to find a way to make sure it does not happen again. We think the solution to the maintenance issue is to make it more visible by merging the more useful parts of SETools into the userspace repo, while deprecating/removing the remaining pieces. However, we are well aware of the complexity of SETools, primarily libapol, and that upstreaming it without any changes would not solve the problems. So, we have done a little work behind the scenes to find a way to reduce the complexity of libapol. As a first stab at it, we started with an older version of libapol that is quite a bit less complex and began porting it forward for use with modern userspace, and seeing if it would make sense to eventually merge. But before we get too deep into this port, we wanted to start a discussion with the SELinux community to make sure we are headed in the right direction. So to start, does this seem like a good idea (both merging with userspace and porting older libapol)? Or should we take a completely different direction (e.g. the use of graphing databases as a replacement of apol has been mentioned in the past)? Another discussion we would like to have, which may affect the future of SETools/apol, is CIL. Is there still interest in CIL? And if so, have there been any thoughts on using and migrating to CIL? Is more work needed before this can happen? Has anyone put thought into higher level languages that could sit on top of CIL? If there is interest, this may affect the SETools changes, for example, syntactic policy analysis for CIL is likely very different than current policy. Thanks, - Steve -- This message was distributed to subscribers of the selinux mailing list. If you no longer wish to subscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the words "unsubscribe selinux" without quotes as the message.
