[Python-Dev] PEP 466 (round 4): Python 2.7 network security enhancements (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Tue Mar 25 23:33:55 CET 2014

On Tue, 25 Mar 2014 23:09:45 +1000 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

Alternative: selectively backport particular APIs ------------------------------------------------- An instinctively minimalist reaction to this proposal is to only backport particular APIs in the affected modules that are judged to be "security critical". However, this ends up providing a worse end user experience, as well as a worse developer experience. For end users, the selective backporting approach means learning not only the legacy Python 2.7 API and the current Python 3 APIs, but also the hybrid API created by the selective backporting process.

I think this is a strawman, since you are also advocating for a "feature detection" approach to writing cross-version code. It is already required, actually, if wanting to write code compatible from 3.2 to 3.4 (for example, SSLContext exists in 3.2 but create_default_context appears in 3.4 while OP_NO_COMPRESSION appears in 3.3).

I would much rather selectively backport a minimal set of APIs than the whole range of ssl APIs. There are things there (RAND_bytes, RAND_pseudo_bytes) that are not even useful for network security, or only in a rather uncommon manner (such as channel bindings).

Regards

Antoine.

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