Re: CPE information for Fedora packages useful?
Hi Silvio!
On Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:21:39 +1100 Silvio Cesare wrote:
Debian maintain a list of CPE inormation for packages on their
security tracker
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/secure-testing/data/CPE/list
We currently do not use CPE names for security tracking in Fedora, so
I don't see an obvious benefit maintaining such list. Can you explain
briefly how you use it for Debian security tracking and what benefits
it brings?
This makes it relatively static except when packages are added or
removed from the repository.
It's not that uncommon to see new packages added to Fedora repositories
even after the release of some Fedora version.
In the past I generated an automatic mapping between packages in
Debian and Fedora
https://github.com/silviocesare/Equivalent-Packages/blob/master/NearestNe...
I played a little more with this list and noticed few problems:
- quite a few Debian packages map to Fedora arptools or binclock.
Probably packages with not much sources, where other file (license,
configure) confuse your tool to match unrelated packages
- there does not seem to be a good way to list cases where multiple
components contain the same sources. In Fedora, mingw32-* packages
are a good example, and the list often maps Debian package foo to
Fedora package mingw32-foo, while there is Fedora package foo that
should be similarly good match. Another example is
zlib:arm-gp2x-linux-zlib.
Did you review "unexpected matches" to see if the sources are really
similar, and how the match is picked when there are multiple "good
candidates"?
--
Tomas Hoger / Red Hat Security Response Team