Re: String additions to 'gdm2.gnome-2-20'

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Claude/Others:

Apologies for breaking string freeze in GDM 2.20.  However, I think that
this change is acceptable for the following reasons, mainly reason #2
which is a security issue.  I think, in this case, security trumps
translation.  However, I do recognize that I should have sent an email
to the gnome-i18n list to let people know about this change.  Sorry for
not doing that.

1) These strings are in debug messages, which are only used when debug
   is turned on.  These debug messages are sent to the system log
   (/var/log/messages or /var/adm/messages depending on your OS).

   I am not sure it really adds value to even translate such debug
   messages anyway.  When people provide debug logs to bugzilla, etc.
   translated messages can make it harder for the people who maintain
   GDM, who typically speak English, to help debug the problem.

2) These messages replaced older messages which included the login user
   in the message.  Bugzilla bug #484750 pointed out that if a user
   were to, by accident, type their password into the username field
   that this would cause their password to get logged to syslog, which
   we should avoid doing ever.

3) These debug messages are only used when the user configures GDM
   to use crypt or shadow passwords, which are not typically used.
   Most users use PAM.  So these messages only affect a small number
   of GDM users.  The commonly used PAM code is smarter about not ever
   logging the username to the system log.

I recommend that we not worry about whether these debug messages are
translated.  Or, I can change these strings so they aren't marked for
translation if that makes things easier.  As I said, I don't think it
adds any significant value to translate these messages.  Or, I could
remove the messages completely from the code if people think that is
a better choice.

Since this affects security, it might also make sense to backport
a similar change to older GDM releases.  I'm not sure if there are
distros/people out there who configure/use older versions of GDM with
shadow/crypt passwords.  If so, let me know and I can make a release
of older versions of GDM's with this security issue fixed.

Please advise if you think further work is needed to fix this issue
properly.

The GDM documentation recommends that people not leave on debug, and
I would like to further stress that users who have configured GDM
to use shadow/crypt passwords should ensure that they have debug
turned off to avoid this sort of problem.  Debug is only intended to
be used briefly when trying to figure out why GDM may not be
functioning properly.

Brian


> Le mercredi 10 octobre 2007 �1:19 +0100, GNOME Status Pages a �it :
> > This is an automatic notification from status generation scripts on:
> >     http://l10n.gnome.org/.
> >
> > There have been following string additions to module 'gdm2.gnome-2-20':
> >
> >     + "Cannot get passwd structure for user"
> >     + "Cannot get passwd structure"
> >     + "Cannot set user group"
> >     + "User not allowed to log in"
> >     + "User password has expired"
> >
> > Note that this doesn't directly indicate a string freeze break, but it
> > might be worth investigating.
>
> Hi Brian,
>
> This seems to be clearly a string freeze breakage (from verify-crypt.c).
> Could you please revert the changes, and explains to the list why you
> think this should really go into gnome-2-20 branch?
>
> Regards,
>
> Claude