ports/177416: mail/postgrey has surfaced a bug in perl's taint checking

[Darren Pilgrim]

The following reply was made to PR ports/177416; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Darren Pilgrim <ports.maintainer at evilphi.com>
To: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org, paulbeard at gmail.com
Cc:  
Subject: Re: ports/177416: mail/postgrey has surfaced a bug in perl's taint
 checking
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:52:47 -0700

 I can't reproduce this.  I have postgrey in production on RELENG_8_3 and 
 RELENG_9_1 systems both i386 and amd64 and in all cases postgrey works 
 without error.  I've also tested all four combinations of inet/unix 
 foreground/daemonized on those systems and postgrey functioned normally. 
   The taint checker triggers on code in the base perl install itself, 
 not in postgrey code.
 
 Paul and I had a fairly extensive email exchange before he filed this 
 PR.  I believe Paul's perl install is broken in some way.  The only 
 other documented instances of the error I could find occur in *very* old 
 perl code.  Perhaps there are stale files or some other undetected 
 conflict among the over 600 perl modules he has installed.  There is 
 also this snippet from the email exchange which implies exactly this 
 scenario:
 
 > Strangely, I deleted that file and rebuilt the port that owns it, but
 > I still get a modification date from 2009:
 > May 13  2009 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.14.2/mach/IO/Socket.pm
 >
 > what do you get for this?
 > pkg_which /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.14.2/mach/IO/Socket.pm
 > Now that I have deleted it, pkgdb thinks it belongs to perl itself.
 
 To me this screams broken install, broken/corrupt ports and/or a damaged 
 package database.  After close to two decades of using perl, it wouldn't 
 surprise me at all if some module stomped on other base/module code and 
 a slightly broken or improperly linted port missed the conflict.  FWIW, 
 on all of my systems, even EOL'd ones, pkg/pkgng tells me that file is 
 owned by lang/perl5.14 and the timestamp is consistent with the last 
 time the port was installed.
 
 Postgrey is a network-enabled daemon.  Running with tainted-variable 
 checking enabled is best practice.  Postgrey itself has had taint-mode 
 enabled since 2005.  I'm not going to hang everyone's tails out in the 
 wind by disabling it by default.  I can't ethically support even a port 
 option to disable it given the circumstances of the error report.  If 
 Paul wants to disable taint-checking on his system, he can, of course, 
 remove the -T flag from the hashbang in the installed script.