On 05/16/2013 12:37 PM, Stephen Smalley wrote:
On 05/16/2013 09:33 AM, Steve Lawrence wrote:
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)?
What is it that makes the modern version of libapol more complex, or
what are you giving up by going back to the older version?
Sorry it took so long to get back to you. The current version of libapol
heavily relies on object oriented techniques, but is entirely written in
C. For example, it uses iterators and a lot of function pointers to use
something akin to inheritance. This makes it very awkward to program in
and adds an unnecessary level of complexity.
Going back to an older version would lose features and support for
policy versions later than 20. The idea was that we would go back to a
simpler point and rebuild or pull in the necessary features and newer
policy version support. A because of the much simpler code base of an
older version, adding back the features would hopefully not be too
difficult.
However, perhaps reducing the complexity isn't worth the effort. And
maybe the dependence of tools in userspace would add more work. It
sounds like maybe the best route might be to merge in libapol in it's
current state. And as updates need to be made for Dan's and other tools
that use libapol, we can gradually reduce the complexity without
breaking everything?
- Steve
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