Re: Moving telnet/telnetd from base to pkgsrc

[maya%netbsd.org@localhost]

On Sat, Dec 15, 2018 at 01:45:04PM +0700, Robert Elz wrote:
>     Date:        Fri, 14 Dec 2018 21:28:34 -0800
>     From:        John Nemeth <jnemeth%cue.bc.ca@localhost>
>     Message-ID:  <201812150528.wBF5SYhr025993%server.cornerstoneservice.ca@localhost>
> 
>   | As kre noted, it is probably the oldest network application
>   | around.  According to Wikipedia, the protocol was developed in
>   | 1969, predating TCP/IP, which means that it is probably the oldest
>   | TCP/IP application there is.
> 
> That's actually what I meant.   I have no idea in which order the BSD
> applications were written (nor, for that matter, their original origins.)
> 
> But if there are bugs in any of them (and that is not impossible, just as
> with any other software) then we should simply fix them, not just declare
> some apps as "too old, abandon it".
> 
> I also simply cannot believe that any issue that might exist in telnet is
> going to be any worse than firefox with a http:// URL ... and I do not see
> anyone suggesting that firefox (and every other browser) should be
> abandoned.

firefox makes an active effort to handle such things and recently had a
massive rewrite into a language better suited for large scale handling
of untrusted input. They also attempt to limit the impact of bugs with
sandboxing (although this doesn't apply for netbsd)

We can probably get away with keeping C for simple things like telnet,
but it takes fuzzing, love, and the willingness to limit the number of
features.

The discussion about telnet was something like
"Why is doing more input processing after hitting an error? then again,
if I change this, there's probably a Rube Goldberg mistake of engineering
reason that it will break 80% of the remaining users of telnet (all
four of them)"
"That is absolutely what will happen. That's what happens when you touch
telnet"

Even the idae of writing a new one was rejected, because who is going to
test it against all the legacy servers today?