[Python-Dev] RFC: Backport ssl.MemoryBIO and ssl.SSLObject to Python 2.7

Nathaniel Smith njs at pobox.com
Tue Jun 6 06:08:47 EDT 2017


On Mon, Jun 5, 2017 at 8:49 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> The reason this kind of approach is really attractive to
> redistributors from a customer risk management perspective is that
> like gevent's monkeypatching of synchronous networking APIs, it's
> *opt-in at runtime*, so the risk of our accidentally inflicting it on
> a customer that doesn't want it and doesn't need it is almost exactly
> zero - if none of their own code includes the "import _tls_bootstrap;
> _tls_bootstrap.monkeypatch_ssl()" invocation and none of their
> dependencies start enabling it as an implicit side effect of some
> other operation, they'll never even know the enhancement is there.
> Instead, the compatibility risks get concentrated in the applications
> relying on the bootstrapping API, since the monkeypatching process is
> a potentially new source of bugs that don't exist in the more
> conventional execution models.

OK. To unpack that, I think it would mean:

2.7's ssl.py and _ssl.c remain exactly as they are.

We create a new _tls_bootstrap.py and __tls_bootstrap.c, which start
out as ~copies of the current ssl.py and _ssl.c code in master.
(Unfortunately the SSLObject code can't just be separated out from
_ssl.c into a new file, because the implementations of SSLObject and
SSLSocket are heavily intertwined.) Then the copied files are hacked
up to work in this monkeypatching context (so that e.g. instead of
defining the SSLError hierarchy in C code, it gets imported from the
main ssl.py).

So: we end up with two copies of the ssl code in the py27 tree, both
diverged from the copy that in the py3 tree, in different ways.

I know that the ssl maintainers won't be *happy* about this given that
keeping the py2 and py3 code similar is an ongoing issue and was one
of the stated advantages of backporting SSLObject, but I don't know
whether it's a showstopper or not; it'd be good to hear their
perspective.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org


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