On Thu, 5 Mar 2020 at 16:45, Anil Belur <abelur@...> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 2:05 AM Allan <aclarke@...> wrote:

Greetings!

 

I have been trying to get a new release of the Plastic sub-project out for 3 weeks now and have been clogged up in LF helpdesk.

 

*Summary*

 

LF is not allowing newer release of Plastic 2.1.7 that fixes 3^rd party vulnerabilities already in 2.1.6 release.

LF wants ODL after-the-fact approval for Plastic 2.1.6 that is already publicly available.

Both LF tooling (Nexus IQ) and vulnerability process is broken.

 

*Details*

 

Here is the sequence of events AFAIKT:

 

• Plastic 2.1.6 released (months ago)
• LF silently changes release process to require Nexus IQ passing (no docs, no links to help PTLs BTW)
• Plastic 2.1.7 candidate build successful but not available for testing
• LF helpdesk says Nexus IQ violations making build unavailable
• (Older version of Guava and Groovy have exposure on features not used by Plastic)
• LF finally gets accounts and links fixed so Nexus IQ reports are available to PTL
• New version of Plastic 2.1.7 candidate build (violations fixed)
• Build still not available due to “violations” (what???)
• Nexus IQ report is all screwed up in the UI, mixing 2.1.6 and 2.1.7 up, mislabeling, clearly buggy
• Nexus IQ report appears to be showing old violations against ALREADY RELEASED 2.1.6
• LF says because security violations are involved, the ODL Security group needs waivers.

 

*Conclusion*

 

I would like to release Plastic 2.1.7. It has improvements and fixes violations in 3^rd party libraries.

It has been languishing and holding up the next major release.

I would like a release process that understands when “the horse has left the barn” and that thinks it is a good thing when a new release fixes vulnerabilities in an old release.

 

Allan Clarke

Plastic PTL

 

Greetings Allan:

I understand the concerns on the delay in releasing Plastic, please find my response below.

 
1. The policy violations are security issues outside the scope of LF/RE's to determine if they can be waived.

2. The policy violations showing up on stage repositories is a "feature" and not a "bug", and a proactive way to ensure these violations are going to be addressed early on before a release. 

3. The violations seen recently in plastic is a result of updating the "Nexus platform plugin", which is working as expected and not a result of any to Nexus repository level setting. 

4. It's seldom up to LF or the PTL's to waive IQ policy violations, waivers can only come from the ODL security team as approved by the TSC.

The concerning thing here for me is LF deployed a new release process requiring someone or group of people to analyse and provide a security waiver to projects before allowing the project to be released and actively blocks the project from doing so. While the goal of this process might be fine and proactive the way LF decided to unleash this to the world is not.

The community was not informed of the new process, nor has there been any communication to the communitiy to setup a process for providing security waivers to projects (if there has I apologies as I have not seen it and would welcome someone to correct me otherwise). The problem is today there is no way for a PTL to have this security waiver approved.

I'm not sure how LF can justify implementing a new "feature" without first implementing any processes around to support the feature with the community, then seemingly telling the community it is their problem to handle it.

Regards,

Thanh