[meinersbur]

This is the WolfSSL maintainer's response[1]

> This ticket is rather long and has a lot of irrelevant content regarding this new topic. If I need to bring in a colleague I do not want them to have to wade through all the irrelevant context. If you would like, please open a new issue with regards to how we support middlebox compatibility.

The author turns this into:

> The GitHub issue comment left at the end leads me to believe that they aren't really interested in RFC compliance. There isn't a middleground here or a "different way" of implementing middlebox compatibility. It's either RFC compliant or not. And they're not.

This is a bad-faith interpretation of the maintainer's response. They only asked to open a new, more specific issue report. The maintainer always answered within minutes, which I find quite impressive (even after the author ghosted for months). The author consumed the maintainer's time and shouldn't get the blame for the author's problems.

[1]: https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfssl/issues/9156

[reanimus]

I don't know, I don't think it's really a huge waste of time considering I just read the entire comment thread in a handful of minutes. And beyond that, failing to comply with RFC requirements is the bug here -- a workaround existing for a specific language isn't a fix.

[deng]

Again: the maintainer does not say there is no bug. He says: please open a new issue, with a proper title and description for the actual underlying problem. Is that seriously too much to ask? Instead, the guy writes a whole blog post shitting on the project. Does anyone still wonder why people burn out on maintaining FOSS projects?

[Alupis]

It's pretty standard to open a new issue and reference the previous issue for context, while keeping the new issue specific about what needs to be addressed - ie. RFC compliance.

I don't see the problem here at all - it was a reasonable request and it would have taken `feld` all of 2 minutes to do. Certainly less time than writing that blog post.

[pseudohadamard]

It's not entirely WolfSSL's fault. TLS 1.3 is a mass of kludges and hacks to deal with the fact that they created a new protocol that's nothing like TLS 1.0-1.2 but dressed it up to make it look like TLS 1.2. It even lies about its protocol version in the handshake, hiding the real version in one of the many extensions they had to invent to kludge it into working. And in terms of RFC compliance, one of the most widely-used implementations isn't compliant, it doesn't send any of the mandatory-to-implement cipher suites in its client hello which means unless you want to trigger a rehandshake on every single connect you have to implement their non-compliant form of TLS 1.3.

The real problem though is that they made a protocol that really, really wants to pretend it's TLS 1.2 when it really isn't anything like TLS 1.2. I wouldn't blame "middleboxes" for getting confused when they encounter that.

[teekert]

A reasonable reply indeed from the maintainer, this happens a lot where you think together in an issue and identify whats really wrong near the end. Only then is one able to articulate an issue in a helpful, concise way. Perhaps GH could add a feature to facilitate this pattern.

[YZF]

The author has spent a lot of time on this as well. I can see both sides. From the author's perspective their focus is their product/system. Any extra time they spend is not contributing to that. They've already spent a fair amount of time helping root cause the issue and from their perspective once it's clear what the issue is they're done. The author also seems to work on open source. In this case they are the customer of a product, granted an open source one, and they've helped the vendor (the maintainer) figure out something is broken. Their expectation is that the vendor takes things on from there and doesn't put up some bureaucracy.

That said ofcourse you paid nothing for this and you should expect nothing but the OSS project also has no expectations that their customers support them if those customers aren't getting their expectations met. In today's world one unhappy customer can give you a pretty bad rep, as is happening here. Now if you don't care then you don't care. But the argument that because your product is "free" then your customers have no voice doesn't sound that great either.

Everyone seems to be pointing how the author disappeared and came back much later. Well, they disappeared because it wasn't a problem or they've worked around it, and came back when they hit the problem again. Just like the maintainer doesn't work for the author the author doesn't work for the maintainer either.

It's also true the ticket now has a lot of history, but the original bug is still the same bug, it's just that now it has been root caused? The maintainer's response of now that you've found a setting that works around the issue you're good and we can close this also is a bit off. And sure, they don't work for anyone so they're welcome to do whatever they want.

As isn't uncommon when two humans communicate online there is some miscommunication here. But you can argue either way. Not being an open source maintainer I don't know what the "protocol" here is but the few times I've filed bugs against an open source product I did personally put in the extra mile to make them actionable. But in my day job I have to deal with all sorts of bug reports and chasing them down to a resolution is part of what makes the product I work on a better one. And yes, I get paid to do that ;)

[johannes1234321]

What tis missing there is a support team and maybe a difference between a customer (user) facing support system and a big tracker.

Support guides the user through the discovery process, which can be messy and go circles, and the result of that is a big which is actionable by a developer.

[hypeatei]

The maintainer should just open a new issue for RFC compliance himself since that's a pretty big issue and he obviously thinks OP spams too much.

This game of stalling / obfuscating via the issue tracker gets very old.

[lelanthran]

> The maintainer should just open a new issue for RFC compliance himself since that's a pretty big issue and he obviously thinks OP spams too much.

Reading the issue tracker, why would he do that unless he could repro?

> Hi @feld , I can't really tell if this is related to the ticket that you pointed out. I'll be helping you with this issue as well as looking into the other ticket. Can you give me step by step instructions on how to reproduce what you are seeing? Please note that I have limitted experience with HAProxy and Erlang.

> ...

> I've successfully connected to the server with the examples/client/client and I cannot reproduce what you are seeing. I've built with both WOLFSSL_TLS13_MIDDLEBOX_COMPAT defined and undefined.

He only gets a reply six months later!

This, I feel, clearly shows Feld's intentions - he wasn't interested in agetting it fixed, it was not a bug for him, but he was interested in spreading the word about it. i.e. To me, anyway, it looks like Feld is more interested in writing outrage-bait than getting a working product.

I've used WolfSSL in anger and the experience was much better than OpenSSL and AWS-lc.

Looking at the ticket itself, I consider the responses from the dev team to be pretty good support - better than some paid products I have used.

[toast0]

I can see both ways here.

If the maintainer just opens the concise bug report they want (RFC .... Section ... If TLS1.3 is negotiated and client sends session id, server must send cipherchangespec), they have what they want and can move on with their life.

However, if the maintainer can get the reporter to do it, the reporter has become a better reporter and the world has become a better place.

IMHO, the original bug report was pretty out there. Asking a library developer to debug a client they don't use with a sever they didn't write either is pretty demanding. I know openssl has a minimal server, I expect woflssl does too? that would be easier to debug.

Actually, on re-reading the original report, the reporter links to a discussion where they have all the RFC references. Had the reporter summarized that to begin with, rather than suggesting a whole lot of other stuff (like a different wolfssl issue that has to be completely unrelated), I think the issue would have gone better.

I will further add that putting a MUST in an appendix seems kind of poor editing. It should have been noted in section 4.1.2 and/or 4.1.3 that a non-empty legacy_session_id indicates that the server MUST send a cipher change spec. It's not totally obvious, but if the client requests middlebox compatability, the RFC says the server MUST do it. If the client doesn't request it by sending a legacy session id, the server can still send a superfluous change cipher spec message if it wants, although I don't know if it will help without the session id.

[deng]

> The maintainer should just

Out of interest: which FOSS projects are you maintaining, and how many users do these have, approximately?

[otterley]

Why should that be the maintainer's burden?

[ablob]

The blog-poster wasn't happy with the issue being closed, so somehow I doubt that opening a new issue and referencing this one would've yielded a different result from what we got now.

[cookiengineer]

I was reading through the complete issue thread and I have to say I probably would side with the wolfSSL maintainers in part but they could have handled it in a nicer way.

"Anthu" only responded with this after "feld" asked why the issue was closed by them, and only then the response you mentioned was written.

"Anthu" could have simply asked before closing the issue and the reporter would have been fine. Like, say "So, this issue meanwhile evolved into RFC compliance and got a bit off track in my opinion. Can you please open up a separate issue for this so we can get this fixed in a more focused manner? That would be very helpful for our workflow. If not, I would open up an issue and reference this one if that's okay with you."

My point is that feld felt a little ignored in their problem, and the support role could have handled it a little nicer. I get that maintainer time is limited, but I would probably recommend an issue template for these matters where there's checkboxes in them like "keep it short, keep it reproducible" and maybe a separate issue template and tag for RFC matters.

On the other hand, "feld"'s blog post reaction was also quite trigger happy and in part in bad faith. They could've communicated the same things in a "non rage mode" after things have calmed down a bit.

[Phemist]

This issue has a similar conversational rhythm that led to the AI agent hit piece that was trending yesterday:

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

The OPs blog post also reeks of a similar style to the hit piece.

Given the large delay between the initial report and further responses by the user `feld`, I wonder if an OpenClaw agent was given free reign to try to clear up outstanding issues in some project, including handling the communication with the project maintainers?

Maybe I am getting too paranoid..

[SubjectToChange]

Worse yet, despite publishing seventeen blog posts between filing the issue and finally responding to it, he has the gall to open with "Sorry I missed your replies (life gets busy)".