RFC 2: Restoring Needed LibTIFF Tools — LibTIFF 4.7.2 documentation

# RFC 2: Restoring Needed LibTIFF Tools

Author: Su Laus

Contact: (@Su_Laus)

Status: Approved

## Summary

The purpose of this RFC is to clarify if and which tools that were moved to the archive in libtiff 4.6.0 should be reactivated.

## Prehistory

The tools in libtiff caused many vulnerabilities and CVEs that were attributed to the libtiff library itself. Trying to fix the security holes in the tools turned out to be a Sisyphean task (can never be done). Therefore, most of the tools in libtiff 4.6.0 were moved to the archive and the existing problems were closed with "wontfix-unmaintained".

It was later understood that some users depend on some of these archived tools.

Some problems with the tools have now been fixed (see e.g. https://gitlab.com/libtiff/libtiff/-/merge_requests/569).

## Proposed procedure

- All tools as of libtiff 4.5.1 shall be restored.

- Bugfixes in MR !569 are applied in single merge requests for traceability and selectively as some changes might not be applicable.

- Remove “wontfix-unmaintained” from closed issues, when fixed.

- All issues related to utilities / tools shall get label “utility”.

- The documentation and other references shall point to https://libtiff.gitlab.io/libtiff/.

- After an initial merge has been applied for restoring the tools, the http://www.libtiff.org page shall be reset as a mirror of https://libtiff.gitlab.io/libtiff/.

- Finally release as 4.7.0 when all known issues of the tools are closed.

## References to previous contributions to the discussion

https://gitlab.com/libtiff/libtiff/-/issues/580 and related merge request, https://gitlab.com/libtiff/libtiff/-/merge_requests/569, and discussion in https://gitlab.com/libtiff/libtiff/-/merge_requests/581

## Voting history

+1 from PSC members @bobfriesenhahn, @1-Olivier, @Su_Laus

+0 from PSC members @theta682 and @rouault