rtools were deemed almost unused 15 years ago...

[Ngie Cooper (yaneurabeya)]

> On Jun 20, 2017, at 11:36 AM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 4:25 AM, Jeremie Le Hen <jlh at freebsd.org <mailto:jlh at freebsd.org>> wrote:
> 
>> Hey folks,
>> 
>> I remember when I was still barely out of my teenagehood, people were
>> mostly using ssh/scp while rtools (rsh, rlogin, ... for the
>> youngsters) were left in place as a courtesy for legacy production
>> systems still relying it on them.
>> 
>> Fast forward to 2017 (so yes, 15 years later), stack-clash [1] sorely
>> reminds us that suid binaries are an attack surface. I don't even need
>> to mention that it's a healthy engineering practice to remove unused
>> code, both from a maintenance and security perspective.
>> 
>> Therefore, I hereby propose to remove rtools from the base system.  I
>> acknowledge this will likely cause troubles for a handful of people
>> who are still relying on it for good or bad reasons. But the flipside
>> is that the attack surface of millions of FreeBSD installed out there
>> will be reduced.
>> 
>> The proposed roadmap is:
>> - disable from the build on head and let it soak for one month
>> - remove rtools from the base.
>> 
>> What do you guys think?  Any preferred color for the bikeshed? :)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> [1] https://www.qualys.com/2017/06/19/stack-clash/stack-clash.txt
> 
> 
> Keep the telnet client. It's still heavily used for more things than
> connecting to telnetd... The rest can go as they are nitch usage that can
> be served by ports.

I’m going to look at our options for telnetd in ports. They both use a common source, so not building telnetd doesn’t give you much RoI.
-Ngie
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