X protocol specs & X.Org Security Advisory: Protocol handling issues in X Window System client libraries

[Gaetan Nadon]

On 13-05-24 11:24 PM, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Answering some questions about these issues today, I wrote:
>
>     [...] when reviewing these, a lot of them were non obvious unless
> you had
>     the source in one window, the protocol headers in another and the
> protocol
>     spec in a third. This was tedious work to cross-reference and
> confirm or
>     refute each report [...]
>
> which reminded me that huge thanks are also due to Matt & Gaetan and
> everyone
> else who helped getting our documentation modernized.
>
> As tedious as this work was, it was far better than if we had to page
> through
> paper manuals or the old postscript dumps from the old nroff specs -
> having
> html specs online with links to jump directly to the right call
> encoding or
> description made it much faster to see which values could be large
> enough to
> cause overflows, or what values we should be checking to limit the
> values to.
>
> So once again, thanks for making our specs more usable!
>
A tribute to your leadership. Not only you got the job done, but you go
it done by volunteers!