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Multiple security issues in GNU Screen

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414 points st_goliath | 1 comments | 13 May 25 11:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.198s | source
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mmsc ◴[13 May 25 12:05 UTC] No.43971967[source]▶
It's surprising that upstream was involved in this. Around 5 years ago, I came to the (sad) conclusion that GNU screen development had completely halted. Is that still not the case?

Does screen have the functionality to add a new window to an existing screen without attaching to the screen yet?

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immibis ◴[13 May 25 13:16 UTC] No.43972604[source]▶
Open source does have a problem with inertia whenever one piece of software ends and another piece is created to replace it, but there's no immediate incentive to switch, because it is a switch, not an update.

Though conversely, when someone buys the trademark for an existing piece of software, and replaces it with something entirely different, like what happened with Audacity, that's also bad. So there's no good solution.

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Wowfunhappy ◴[13 May 25 13:27 UTC] No.43972716[source]▶
Isn't this what distros are for? So e.g. Debian could decide to replace screen with tmux, possibly with some sort of compatibility package that takes all the same command line arguments as screen but uses tmux under the hood. (I've used screen very little and have never used tmux so I'm not sure if that would make sense in this context).
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kevin_thibedeau ◴[13 May 25 13:44 UTC] No.43972924[source]▶
Tmux doesn't support serial ports.
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PhilipRoman ◴[13 May 25 13:56 UTC] No.43973045[source]▶
I'm not sure what made "screen" integrate the two separate pieces of functionality - you can use something minimal like "tio" for serial port access and it's much more elegant.
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1. JdeBP ◴[13 May 25 15:00 UTC] No.43973708[source]▶
It's not separate functionality. The back end (so-called "master" side) of a pseudo-terminal is almost (bar initialization of line speed, hardware flow control, and framing settings) indistinguishable from a "null-modem" call-out serial port or parallel port terminal device. Write a software terminal emulation program for the former, which of course is what screen has, and you already have one for the latter.