Request for Comments for Configurable Lints in ZLint

[chris]

Howdy folks,

The team at ZLint is considering the inclusion of a new configuration framework with the hopes of addressing a limitation in its ability to accurately run lints that require information that is not encoded in any x509 certificate.

While the proposed implementation is a non-breaking change for ZLint, and is opt-in only, it does have implications for contributors to the project who wish to write lints utilizing this framework. Additionally, there may be implications on the tooling and pipelines used by certificate authorities when using this framework. As such, the team is hoping to solicit feedback on the proposed solution.

The GitHub discussion tracking this issue may be found at RFC for Configurable Lints #624 (https://github.com/zmap/zlint/issues/624).

Some categories that the ZLint team would consider to be especially valuable include (but are not limited to)...

For lint contributors:

• How might this framework have helped you build lints that were otherwise left as being too ambiguous due to a lack of information?
• What lints might this framework fail to address?
• How are the ergonomics of the proposed framework?

For certificate authorities:

• How does this fit into your automated tooling?
• Would it be needlessly difficult to generate/version control/test these configurations?
• Is the proposal in some way incompatible with your workflow?

As always, any and all comments and contributions made by the community are deeply appreciated by the ZLint team, and we welcome as many participants to the discussion (and code!) as those that wish to join!

Thank you for your continued use, and contributions to, the ZLint project.