Code review comment for lp:~vila/bzr/1538480-match-hostname

> Vincent, what you've done here is excellent and definitely an improvement over
> the contributed patch, exempli gratia, adding the not_ok function.
>
> What I'm curious about is this patch requires python >= 2.7.9. Do we plan to
> bump our python version requirement from 2.6 to 2.7.9?

Ha, the difficult question :)

So I went to https://docs.python.org/2.6/ and saw 'last updated Oct 29, 2013'. I.e. python 2.6 didn't receive any security support for the last 2 years.

And I'm seeing various projects dropping support for 2.6 too including testtools that is a requirement for bzr tests.

All in all, I think this means that bzr itself cannot support security fixes for python 2.6.

So I dropped the obsolete copy of python 3.2 (not supported anymore either).

In turns this means that people using a bzr 2.6 AND wanting https security support needs to upgrade to python 2.7.

In other words, we attempted to support cert checking with py2.6 at best as we could, we cannot anymore. This specific feature is controlled via the 'ssl.cert_reqs' config option which can be disabled if needed.

So with this patch, py27 users get better security, py26 users will need to verify their certs by other means and use the option to disable bzr checks but won't be lured into a false sense of security.

Apart from that scenario, py26 is still supported (but not regularly tested to the best of my knowledge).

>
> The other part of the patch checks for match_hostname in the ssl library and,
> if not found, imports it from backports.

I've never heard about a python 'backports' library, may be that's specific to the distribution the patch author is using ?

> 1. Is that a worthwhile exercise in light of python version requirements?

I don't think so, if we need to invest into a porting effort, I'd rather see work around forward porting to py3 than back porting to py2.6 ;)

On the other hand, we may want to officially stop supporting py26 in the future.

> 2. Is backports normally available or would we change our dependencies to get
> it?

Not that I know of.