Re: [opendkim:bugs] #222 Enhance config file element handling for unrecognized tags/parameters (fwd)

From: Scott Kitterman <ietf-dkim_at_kitterman.com>
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2015 08:30:59 -0400

On March 29, 2015 3:37:21 AM EDT, "Murray S. Kucherawy" <msk_at_blackops.org> wrote:
>Does anyone have an opinion about this?
>
>In this case the new version dropped a major feature (ADSP), and the
>result of this change would be that ADSP configuration file items would
>be
>logged but ignored. Someone not checking logs and relying on ADSP to
>be
>there might find out much later that a feature she was anticipating had
>actually been removed. Personally I would rather deal with the failure
>and know the current state of things than have important features
>quietly
>go missing on me. Do others have an opinion here?
>
>I would suggest that the package maintainer should've fixed the
>configuration rather than simply replacing the binary, which is what
>appears to have happened.

Agreed, but it's an easy mistake to make.

>We would at least want to reject configurations for things that are
>completely unknown, but have a period during we do log-but-continue for
>settings that have been removed.
>
>Any other suggestions?

From a Debian/Ubuntu perspective this is somewhat unlikely to come up outside the context of a distribution version upgrade unless one is running the development version of the distro.

In either of these cases, the admin should be paying close attention to how the system is working.

I can kind of see this issue both ways: logging and refusing to work both have merit. I'm not sure which is better.

Scott K
Received on Sun Mar 29 2015 - 12:30:59 PST