Fixing NSS and p11-kit in Fedora (and beyond)

[David Woodhouse]

On Fri, 2015-05-08 at 12:39 -0700, Ryan Sleevi wrote:
> On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 5:50 AM, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:
> > I'd quite like to get NSS fixed, but I'm not entirely averse to just
> > going through Fedora packages and switching them to build against
> > GnuTLS or OpenSSL instead, if NSS is going to prove too resistant to
> > getting fixed :)
> 
> s/get NSS fixed/add support for a new feature to NSS/ . Let's call a
> spade a spade :)

It's rarely productive to argue about the precise distinction between a
'bug' and a 'missing feature'. The difference is really about
expectations.

Certainly I'll grant you that when Mozilla bug 248722 was filed in 2004,
asking for a system-wide configuration for PKCS#11 modules, it was
entirely reasonable to call it a 'feature request'.

One might *possibly* argue that in the decade that has passed since
then, during which p11-kit has been developed and has become ubiquitous
across Linux (and other *NIX) distributions, the expectations changed
and it might be reasonable these days to considered it more of a bug
than a missing features.

Certainly, in the context of Fedora, whose packaging guidelines now say
that applications SHOULD use the modules specified in the p11-kit
configuration, there's a fairly strong case for calling it a 'bug'.

But as I said, there's not a lot of point in arguing about terminology.
If you want to call it a 'missing feature', that's fine by me.

-- 
dwmw2