response, improve NOTAINT docs

2 files changed, 17 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/README b/README
index b7b99c0c0..ba632a300 100644
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -4,7 +4,10 @@ documentation wiki and a man page, and "make install" will install ikiwiki.
 A few special variables you can set while using the Makefile:
 
 PROFILE=1 turns on profiling for the build of the doc wiki. Uses Devel::Profile
-NOTAINT=1 turns off the taint flag in the ikiwiki program
+
+NOTAINT=1 turns off the taint flag in the ikiwiki program. (Recommended
+unless your perl is less buggy than mine -- see
+http://bugs.debian.org/411786)
 
 All other documentation is in the ikiwiki documentation wiki, which is also
 available online at <http://ikiwiki.info/>
diff --git a/doc/bugs/taint_issue_with_regular_expressions.mdwn b/doc/bugs/taint_issue_with_regular_expressions.mdwn
index 174b4f1c5..e05a59879 100644
--- a/doc/bugs/taint_issue_with_regular_expressions.mdwn
+++ b/doc/bugs/taint_issue_with_regular_expressions.mdwn
@@ -7,3 +7,16 @@ It works if I replace it with:
     my ($f)=/(^[-[:alnum:]_.:\/+]+$)/; # untaint
 
 which is exactly the same regular expression drawn out as a constant.  It appears that %config gets some tainted data and is itself being marked entirely tainted, which may prevent using regular expressions contained in it for untainting other data.  I'm using Perl 5.8.8.
+
+> How could `%config` possible get tainted? That would be a major security
+> hole. It seems more likely that perl containes to have taint flag bugs
+> even in 5.8. See also: [[prune_causing_taint_mode_failures]],
+> [[Insecure_dependency_in_mkdir]],
+> [[Insecure_dependency_in_eval_while_running_with_-T_switch.mdwn]],
+> and especially [[debbug 411786]]
+>
+> The last of those was the last straw for me, and I disabled taint
+> checking in the debian package. You can do the same by building ikiwiki
+> with NOTAINT=1. :-( --[[Joey]]
+
+[[tag done]]