>    Is it worth the effort to report that kind of issues and work on better 
> quality patches?

That's not a simple yes/no answer. Generally speaking, I'm only going to do 
releases when the Shibboleth Project has a need for them. There is no other 
reason I can spend time on this code. That need is likely to end sometime in 
2023-2024 when I replace the dependency on this code with Java so that I can 
officially end my involvement with this code and Xerces. Xerces itself is a 
project that is dead in all but name, with open, unfixed vulnerabilities. Since 
this code depends on Xerces...you can do the math.

I just did a release because I needed one. I won't do another one until I need 
something again.

In terms of "risk", any patches that could impact basic correctness are 
probably off-limits unless they address a bug I'm affected by.

Patches that don't impact my project are more likely to be "accepted" if and 
when I do a release, and anything in the XPath or XKMS areas are in that 
category. I wouldn't be able to review them for correctness but if they look ok 
I would usually apply them.

One type pf patch I will *not* accept is anything that works around somebody 
else's bug. I don't know for certain, but it seemed like your "RSA padding" 
issue might be in that category if you're trying to deal with something being 
missing from the message that is required by the standard. That's not going to 
happen. Coding defensively if it's crashing is fine, I would do that, but I 
would never support non-compliant inputs. That is just madness. But if it's a 
real bug not handling something we need to handle, that's a different matter.

I would close with: this is just me. If somebody else steps up as a committer, 
they're welcome to adopt a different standard or do more frequent releases, but 
I would wield my PMC vote against that last category of patches. I simply 
believe that's wrong, and a bad idea.

-- Scott


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