Update 0: Fixed title, it's 5 rather than 4, and possibly another that's undisclosed.

Update 1: Apparently, GNOME bureaucracy is holding up the processing the application of a new maintainer for over a month now. Major browsers responded by deprecating/removing XSLT support. XSLT is/was mainly used for rendering and transforming SGML, HTML, and XML to other forms, I didn't even realize browsers supported it directly. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/150

--- List

0: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/139

1: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/140

2: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/144

3: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/148

4: BIGSLEEP-433713988 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/433713988

> Please be aware: nobody will merge your fix because there are no active maintainers remaining. (If anybody is interested in maintaining libxslt, please let me know.) Having patches here will help a lot anyway, though, since downstream vendors will be able to use them.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/144#note_245...

List of FreeBSD ports that are unlikely to build without `make DISABLE_VULNERABILITIES=yes`:

https://pastebin.com/raw/5dQ2U46f

I guess, technically, if libxslt isn't statically or dynamically linked in like browsers and some other programs do and only used as a build dep such as through xsltproc, there's not really a security issue after a build. For all runtime use / direct linking of libxslt, it's still a problem.

> Update 1: Apparently, GNOME bureaucracy is holding up the processing the application of a new maintainer for over a month now.

Could you explain this? You link to a closed bugreport where a new maintainer stepped up. A previously experienced developer said it'll take several months at least to get up to speed.

That a new person needs to be vouched for a critical library is pretty critical. There's been several examples where a malicious developer took over a critical project.

> Major browsers responded by deprecating/removing XSLT support.

This is not true. They’re investigating doing that. There is no actual deprecation yet, and even if they do decide to deprecate and then remove, I imagine the process would take at least a couple of years. The first actual major feature removal from the web would be a big deal.

Blink declared intent to deprecate and remove XSLT in both 2013 and 2015, but gave up on them each time. My feeling is that both sides may actually be stronger this time—browser makers more intent on removing it, and objections louder too.

A decade ago, Google tried to kill MathML in not entirely dissimilar circumstances—though in that case they didn’t even have a shipping implementation themselves. When the dust settled, MathML Core was a thing, and Igalia had implemented it in Chromium. It wouldn’t surprise me if they do end up removing XSLT, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if we actually ended up with a new commitment to XSLT and XSLT 3.0 support out of this commotion. That’s what I’m hoping for.

> Apparently, GNOME bureaucracy is holding up the processing the application of a new maintainer for over a month now.

This wording seems unjustly negative. You’re talking about software which is shipped in every browser, all Linux distributions, and bundled in a ton of languages. A short delay doesn’t seem unwarranted for key bits of infrastructure.

> Major browsers responded by deprecating/removing XSLT support

Its probably wrong to think the browser stuff is solely due to lack of maintainer.

It's clear from that bug tracker that you shouldn't let libxlst see untrusted stylesheets or xpath expressions.

I haven't yet seen a problem with running your own transformations against untrusted XML.

Maybe a new maintainer could aim to make the second case fully supported but not the first.