Re: Stuff for 2.4.1 - Mailing list psycopg

On 27/03/11 19:23, David Blewett wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Daniele Varrazzo
> <daniele.varrazzo@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 12:51 PM, Harald Armin Massa
>> > <harald@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>>> >> Are you really sure that psycopg2 should go the road of having own
>>> >> parsers in addition to libpq-s routines? As much as I am happy about
>>> >> the robustness when having other libpqs, and about the performance
>>> >> benefit, as much I fear to have some new areas for possible bugs -
>>> >> especially security-relevant things like SQL-injections.
>> >
>> > The will to stick as much as possible to the libpq functions has been
>> > the reason I had not written the above parser before (releasing
>> > 2.4.0). Unfortunately the bytea problem has proven trickier to handle
>> > for many psycopg users. I've changed my mind as I think psycopg has
>> > the responsibility to provide a set of feature in a robust way, and if
>> > the libpq is just not reliable for bytea parsing (for me the hex
>> > format should have been backported to the the client libraries of the
>> > previous versions) I think we have to provide a solution, not just to
>> > propagate the problem.
> I think I agree with Harald here. In my opinion, this shouldn't be
> done at the driver level. There never has been a guarantee from the
> database side that applications compiled against older libpq will be
> able to communicate with newer versions. Emulating this in the driver
> only propagates this mis-conception. What has been the problem in the
> past? Maybe the documentation should be improved so that people are
> sure to build against the appropriate version of libpq for the version
> of the server they intend to communicate with?

What Daniele did is fine:

1) There is no security problem, because the code only work in the
   database->user direction.

2) Allows communication with different combinations of backend/libpq
   versions without adding the overhead of extra quesries when
   establishing the connection (i.e., it just works and this is
   very important for the user).

Also, while I am writing very few new code I am reviewing everything and
I am confident to say that psycopg is much safe now than 2 years ago
when I was the only developer.

federico

--
Federico Di Gregorio                         federico.digregorio@dndg.it
Studio Associato Di Nunzio e Di Gregorio                  http://dndg.it
 When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they
  means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth.
                                                    -- Granny Weatherwax