annotate README.MTN @ 30273:6829b27ee4c8

This patch attempts to fix four bugs in the oscar protocol plugin that were introduced with the X-Status code in Pidgin 2.7.0. Problem #1 (the remotely-triggerable crash): The crash happens when a buddy sets an xstatus message containing <desc> but no closing </desc>, or <title> but no closing </title>. The fix is to check the result of strstr(closing_tag_name) and do nothing if it is NULL. This is CVE-2010-2528. Problem #2: Fixes potential incorrect parsing of the xstatus string that could result in an incorrect message being displayed to the libpurple user. Happens if an xstatus message contains </desc> before <desc>, or </title> before <title>. The fix is to start looking for the closing tag at the end of the beginning tag rather than at the beginning of the xstatus xml. Probably not a security problem, but definitely a bug. Problem #3: Fixes potential incorrect parsing of the xstatus string that could result in the title not being shown to the libpurple user. Happens if the close title tag appears after the desc tag in the xstatus xml, because we add a null character at the beginning of the close title tag, so strstr() for the desc tag would stop searching there. Probably not a security problem, but definitely a bug. Problem #4: Fixes potential incorrect display of the xstatus string that could result in an incorrect message being displayed to the libpurple user. Happens because we reusing the 'xml' string when preparing the string for the user, but we copy values from xml to xml. If those values overlap with themselves or with each other then an incorrect value could be displayed. Probably not a security problem, but definitely a bug.

If you plan to use Pidgin, Finch and libpurple from our Monotone repository,
PLEASE read this message in its entirety!

Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple are a fast-moving project with a somewhat regular
release schedule.  Due to the rate of development, the code in our Monotone
repository undergoes frequent bursts of massive changes, often leaving behind
brokenness and partial functionality while the responsible developers rewrite
some portion of code or seek to add new features.

What this all boils down to is that the code in our Monotone repository _WILL_
sometimes be broken.  Because of this, we ask that users who are not interested
in personally tracking down bugs and fixing them (without a lot of
assistance from the developers!) use only released versions.  Since releases
will be made often, this should not prevent anyone from using the newest,
shiniest features -- but it will prevent users from having to deal with ugly
development bugs that we already know about but haven't gotten around to fixing.

If you are interested in hacking on Pidgin, Finch, and/or libpurple, please
check out the information available at: http://developer.pidgin.im

By far the best documentation, however, is the documented code.  If you have
doxygen, you can run "make docs" in the toplevel directory to generate pretty
documentation.  Otherwise (or even if you do!), the header files for each
subsystem contain documentation for the functions they contain.  For instance,
conversation.h contains documentation for the entire purple_conversation_*
API, and account.h contains documentation for the purple_account_* API.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact the Pidgin, Finch, and
libpurple developers by email at [e-mail] or on IRC at irc.freenode.net
in #pidgin.  Please do as much homework as you can before contacting us; the
more you know about your question, the faster and more effectively we can help!

Patches should be posted as Trac tickets at: http://developer.pidgin.im