[OTC VOTE PROPOSAL] Fixing missing failure exit status is a bug fix

[Kurt Roeckx]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 01:51:44PM +0200, Nicola Tuveri wrote:
> Background
> ----------
> 
> This follows up on a [previous proposal] that was abandoned in favor of
> an OMC vote on the behavior change introduced in [PR#13359].
> Within today's OTC meeting this was further discussed with the attending
> members that also sit in the OMC.
> 
> The suggestion was to improve the separation of the OTC and OMC domains
> here, by having a more generic OTC vote to qualify as bug fixes the
> changes to let any OpenSSL app return an (early) failure exit status
> when a called function fails.
> 
> The idea is that, if we agree on this technical definition, then no OMC
> vote to allow a behavior change in the apps would be required in
> general, unless, on a case-by-case basis, the "OMC hold" process is
> invoked for whatever reason on the specific bug fix, triggering the
> usual OMC decision process.
> 
> Proposed vote text
> ------------------
> 
>         In the context of the OpenSSL apps, we qualify as bug fixes the
>         changes to return a failure exit status when a called function
>         fails unrecoverably.

I'm not sure the unrecoverably should be there. I think this was
about verifying is a public or private key was valid. If such a
function returns it's not valid, I don't call that an
unrecoverable error. But I do expect the application to return an
error exit code.

An other example is s_client, which ignores verification errors by
default. You can change that behaviour with -verify_return_error. If
you do that, s_client will actually exit with return value 1 in case
of a verification error.


Kurt