Re: [gnome-love] Code Auditing as Love

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I was just reading today's LWN front page <http://lwn.net/>, and wondered
> what we were doing to promote auditing action on the GNOME code... This is
> certainly something that budding hackers can contribute to - even lodging
> bugs about suspicious code would be very helpful.
>
> Perhaps we should have an Amazing Auditing Dude award of the week, published
> in the GNOME summaries? It's very important for new contributors to feel
> known and welcome, and I think this would be a good way to highlight some
> tough work being done.

If people are looking for something to audit, one of the first, most
important places to start is the gdk-pixbuf image loaders.  Having
written one, I lie awake at night in fear that some carefully
constructed gif could blow away someone's thesis when they get an email
message or browse the web.

More generally, the kernel project has a kernel-janitor list (which
looks fairly empty, unfortunately.)  I don't know if that's the kind of
thing that gnome-love would turn into, but it might be nice for people
to look at some of the more cruddy parts of GNOME and fix them.  I think
that sometimes a bunch of people can make a lot of superficial
improvements to a codebase very quickly.

-Jonathan