Well, I guess I'll avoid updating for the next few days. A bit worrisome that I did so last night.
I wish I had a clear operating system to switch to for safety and the benefits that come with the AUR or the Nix ecosystem. Unfortunately it seems that the era of being able to naively and gratefully trust in the armies of volunteer maintainers is over.
LLMs make large scale and long-term attacks easy and cheap. You could (and if I was a three letter agency, I would probably do so!) maintain ten thousand packages as three thousand separate "individuals" for years before cashing in the trust you've built up.
Sadly, this is the future of a lot of FLOSS development unless people start to see their projects as their legacy instead of a simple hobby or a way to scratch an itch.
Once your project obtains any sort of real notoriety, it starts having a blast radius, and you need to have at least some idea of who is pushing what to it when and why. The Linux kernel has a pretty good system of this for the time being with Linus being BDFL. There's governance, there's a standard, and most importantly, there are resources coming in.
If your wares are being used by large groups of people you've never met and in ways you cannot possibly imagine, then it's time to start doing the boring paperwork and political parts of managing the community around it, not just pushing commits and adding features.
The explicit expectation with the AUR has always been that you can't blindly trust the PKGBUILD files. It's more like running an installer from a random website on Windows than it is to using official distro repositories. I think the wiki also always advised against using AUR helper tools that blur the lines between official repositories and the AUR.
Practically, is there a better alternative to Arch/AUR? I've used it for years because of the bleeding-edge packages and stability (for me) but with the increased security incidences I don't feel safe. I don't have the time/desire to read the build files of every package I install.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 22.9 ms ] threadArch Linux disables AUR package adoption (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123208)
I wish I had a clear operating system to switch to for safety and the benefits that come with the AUR or the Nix ecosystem. Unfortunately it seems that the era of being able to naively and gratefully trust in the armies of volunteer maintainers is over.
LLMs make large scale and long-term attacks easy and cheap. You could (and if I was a three letter agency, I would probably do so!) maintain ten thousand packages as three thousand separate "individuals" for years before cashing in the trust you've built up.
Once your project obtains any sort of real notoriety, it starts having a blast radius, and you need to have at least some idea of who is pushing what to it when and why. The Linux kernel has a pretty good system of this for the time being with Linus being BDFL. There's governance, there's a standard, and most importantly, there are resources coming in.
If your wares are being used by large groups of people you've never met and in ways you cannot possibly imagine, then it's time to start doing the boring paperwork and political parts of managing the community around it, not just pushing commits and adding features.