Humble question: how do you find out if your system has been affected by a malware?
I know that for AUR there was a specific list of affected packages (that I checked, and haven't installed any of them), but I'm interested more in a general way. It could be from AUR, npm, or many other sources. Some malware could break and lock immediately the system, but other could stay there silent for months, so how to find out if there is any?
I haven't run an antivirus since I last used Windows 20 years ago.
The AUR really has been known to be low-hanging fruit for bad actors, which makes it somewhat surprising it took this long for it to be taken advantage of.
I have many opinions regarding this situation, but it mostly doesn't matter. AUR staff and AUR helper developers will figure out what they want to do, hopefully they will find a good approach.
But what I personally take away from this is simply that it has become worth it to target desktop Linux with malware. Or at least, moreso than previously. It is perhaps a good sign in some ways that the desktop is starting to be taken more seriously.
The bad news, of course, is that the Linux desktop is a bit of a train wreck in terms of security hygeine. It's getting better, and Linux does have the advantage of having some powerful primitives to exploit, but the desktop suites come from a totally different world, and I fully expect we'll also see more malware propagated through KDE's New Stuff integration (which goes through Pling.)
I'm not sure if it is that the desktop is being taken more seriously, or that its easier to write code that works on many distributions and configurations, greatly reducing the cost and increasing the value of the existing 'market'.
I would say that it is now very easy to steal 'AI' providers credentials this way. And then you can use them to write more malware or scam or use models for generating speech to call people and get them to 'redeem'. Or at leat to me this seems more sensible than injecting just malware.
> It's getting better, and Linux does have the advantage of having some powerful primitives to exploit, but the desktop suites come from a totally different world,
When opening the printer configuration page in the KDE configuration panel, I was pleasantly surprised to see it's process runs wrapped inside a bwrap session. Cups is a bit of old and dangerous; I'm glad they sealed that off inside a sandbox. If you ask me, I would make this approach the standard for any software. The configuration panel for fonts doesn't need network access, so at least `bwrap --unshare-net`
I think KDE's approach is a greater danger. They both come with warnings, but with AUR (depending on tools) allows you to inspect the PKGBUILD. KDE just gives you a warning and no easy way of looking at what you are installing, it is not clear what contains executable code, and its enabled by default.
In general things that are not part of your distro's supported repos (KDE's AUR, language package installers like npm and pypi, Ubuntu PPAs, etc.) seem to present far more of a risk.
The AUR is effectively a pastebin for PKGBUILD files.
Some people (many of which don't even use Arch itself) have been treating and advertising it as something different. It's not a software distribution method meant for normal computer users.
In case anyone missed it, the latest version of yay (v13+) supports being able to skip recently added packages through its new Lua extension system https://jguer.github.io/yay/lua.html#upgrade-selection-hooks. You can control the threshold since it's just user configuration now.
This is a good thing, because the warning about checking everything you download from the AUR, which has always existed, is now actually "enforced". People respond to consequences.
I'll note that OpenSuse also has Packman which a shitton of people enable (for codecs), has also 'one namespace only' an looser policies than the main distro.
I do not think this something you can escape by switching distro.
Yes, the only reason this isn't happening in other distros is simply popularity.
Namespacing is the solution, and as mentioned in the article some ditros do indeed have namespaced user repos, like Fedora's Copr. The trust model of a flat namespace user repo is completely broken when the maintaining user can change at any moment.
"One namespace" is also technically true but doesn't work the same way with dnf or zypper as it does with pacman. dnf and zypper both make it easy to be explicit about the priorities of your repos and also to track which packages come from which repos and prevent that from changing. Plus openSUSE has a generously free public instance of the Open Build Service that you can easily use to host your own repos, and which hosts many individual repos you can add for specific purposes. When I ran openSUSE I always just ran my own repo there with only the extra packages I actually wanted, often just "forking" packages from repos hosted by well-known openSUSE developers so that I didn't have to manage updating the source packages myself but still didn't pull in the whole world from those repos and also didn't implicitly trust anything as loose as the AUR.
OBS is more like Ubuntu's Launchpad or Fedora's CO0R than the AUR. Random strangers can't take over the packages of others just because they go idle, and it's a bunch of separate repos, not one. Totally different trust model.
I use Gentoo. You have to specifically install "overlays" and every package maintainer would make their own overlay. You can't easily take over an overlay without the original person's permission.
That being said, still one namespace. Once you add an overlay it can replace any package it wants.
It's also Gentoo so too hard for most people to figure out.
Zypper at least has a notion of "vendor", so you can arrange things so that only the handful of packages you care about will actually come from Packman.
Ubuntu actually has first-party repositories with proprietary codecs.
Nixpkgs is a pretty comprehensive monorepo of packages with a more normal review process than the AUR, and it includes non-free software as well, plus the model with flakes for third-party stuff is that you trust individual publishers for their little repos rather than one giant grab bag repo of unreviewed content like the AUR.
RPMFusion for Fedora kinda has a similar profile, in that it's a shared repo for various things unsuitable for the main one, but it follows more or less normal Fedora packaging and review standards, doesn't it?
Supply chain attacks are possible everywhere and some distros have particular weaknesses, but the AUR really is pretty much uniquely bad here.
Note that the AUR attacks were part of the larger miasma worm campaign, gradually trying to gain more control through various package ecosystems since the RedHat prototype campaign.
Well all of those attacks are just supply chain attacks, and it is basically exploiting people's trust. With LLMs, the speed and velocity of pumping out malice raised are now significantly faster.
It is so sad that every goodwill eventually got enshittified as well.
Despite that official Arch repos weren't affected in this attack,
I would not recommend using Arch (or any rolling release distro)
for anything that requires security.
(Imagine if the xz backdoor targeted Arch...)
An Arch maintainer that I personally know once admitted that he
rarely review upstream changes when bumping package versions.
He only does that when the build breaks.
I can't blame him for what he did, since it's not reasonable to
ask package maintainers to spend all their time on those stuff,
especially in this "Age of AI" where more and more software are being
aggressively refactored (or rather rewritten) and added more features.
What we can do is choosing a stable distro (like Debian) where
packages are more thoroughly reviewed, and apply security practices
(such as TOTP, sandboxing browsers and video players, etc.)
even though they cause inconvenience.
> An Arch maintainer that I personally know once admitted that he rarely review upstream changes when bumping package versions.
Cool story bro. Assuming that's common, I have trouble understanding why Arch (non-AUR) is any more at risk than Debian--besides the latter being more popular and having more users/incidental testers, which is a real benefit if that's your goal, but has its own drawbacks (like older and known-vulnerable packages lingering for longer before updated releases are made available).
> it's not reasonable to ask package maintainers to spend all their time on those stuff, especially in this "Age of AI"
Aren't Debian and friends similarly at risk of this as well, then?
> security practices (such as TOTP, sandboxing browsers and video players, etc.)
I'm not sure if those are more or less prevalent on Arch; I know that many IDEs and GUI programs I've installed on Arch ran by default in Flatpaks or similar, and Debian/Ubuntu like Snaps, but I'm honestly not familiar with whether those ecosystems have significant and/or equivalent penetration in different distros.
Debian freezes the package versions on release of each Debian version and then cherry picks critical fixes for the rest of the Debian version's lifecycle. So even if they never review the code (and I don't expect them to), they're less likely to release malware before it's discovered by others.
That model is getting increasingly difficult and labor intensive, unfortunately. More and more upstream are abandoning the old school security advisories. Not many are isolating CVEs or security fixes into distinct patches, the fixes come with a version bump and often accompany new features or other bug fixes.
There's also plenty projects that silently fix security bugs without issuing a CVE or even labelling them. So now the maintainer of that packages has to monitor the commit logs, figure out if a particular bug fix has security implications and then backport it to the older version which is becoming harder and harder over time.
Unless you have a massive team or a big enough army of volunteers, the LTS model is becoming less and less viable over time, you are often safer on rolling release or close to it (something like Fedora's pace is good).
You get a lower risk of them pulling in a bleeding edge vulnerability, but a higher risk that you'll get stuck with an old bug waiting for the maintainer to pull in a patch. Then there's the risk that in their attempt to cherry pick, they don't actually mitigate the issue (or introduce more issues based on how they diverge from upstream).
> but a higher risk that you'll get stuck with an old bug waiting for the maintainer to pull in a patch. Then there's the risk that in their attempt to cherry pick, they don't actually mitigate the issue
Which is why the whole process is open sourced and you can get easily the source version of a package, edit it and rebuild it.
Alarming. The whole point of official repositories is they're trusted, since they are maintained by trusted people. If one can't trust maintainers to be responsible, then the official repositories are no different than the AUR.
It's a complete fantasy that Debian maintainers do a thorough review of changed packages. It's not a responsibility they have, and it would be impossible anyway (how many packages are there in Debian? How many maintainers are there?).
AUR is fast and loose and doesn't do much "handling" by design, so it's hard to find any equivalent repo. But there's always a tradeoff between fresh (nixpkgs unstable, might be the closest) and tested (Debian).
AUR isn't just the testing repo of Arch; it's explicitly just an open spot where anybody can put up "here's a PKGBUILD for folks". I don't see how it's like either the Nix or Debian examples.
Well, Nix has NUR which is a direct equivalent but it's not nearly as broadly used and I assume "here's a PKGBUILD for folks" is already too permissive for you if you're asking.
There's no maintainer vetting process in nixpkgs as far as I know, anyone can own a bunch of packages. There are quality standards and it's not "here's a bunch of nix code for folks" but it's the next possible thing in the line after that.
It seems like you may have mistakenly inferred that I have issues with the AUR?
I don't; I use Arch on 100% of my personal servers, have done so for something approaching 20 years, and don't see myself changing.
But I treat the AUR for what it is: a place where anybody can say "here's a PKGBUILD for folks" and it's on me to evaluate it on its merits.
I was legitimately asking the person upthread what other distro they felt had a better model for this kind of sharing, because they seemed to think this was a reason for Arch users to jump ship and I was curious what they thought would be the elements of a better system.
The NUR was sort of convenient before flakes were a thing, but now that there's a really common convention for sharing Nix code few use it. I bet most people who came across Nix in the last 4 years have never even heard of it.
Gentoo's model appears to be basically the same? Like the AUR, anybody can submit basically anything they want. The requirements amount to containing valid packages, having a bugzilla account, and putting your package definitions in VCS somewhere.
Opensuse OBS. Tiny bit better because the build environment doesn't allow a network and binaries are not allowed as far as I know. Fedora has a similar thing COPR. Both of these support building packages for other distros as well as appimage, flatpak etc.
With opensuse official packages also use the same infrastructure. It is actually quite fascinating and powerful. (I know a lot less about COPR but I would imagine it would be equally as good. Wezterm switched to that for its packages)
The AUR has consistently had warnings around it of 'verify the PKGBUILD', far more so than any other package repository that allows anyone to sign up. Probably the only notable difference is the ease of taking over an orphaned package.
The AUR is not the Arch package manager or repository. The main Arch package repos are managed similarly to Debian, or Fedora, or whatever--caveat Arch's nature as a rolling release, but in terms of vetting and ownership/security, the approaches are similar. pacman installs from regular, real, vetted repositories by default. pacman will never install from the AUR. pacman is the official Arch package manager and the only one that is provided with the main Arch distribution/install instructions.
The AUR is, as many others have pointed out, a deliberately un-vetted pile of random Git repos. Arch deliberately doesn't even ship with a default one-click installer for AUR packages; their published guidance is "git clone this stuff from wherever it's hosted and build it at your own risk". Plenty of third-party, non-Arch-blessed tools turn that into a one-click process, but it's not "part" of Arch itself--at least not any more than, like, curl | bash or directions on how to add rando websites to /etc/apt/sources.list.d is part of Debian and friends.
I've used Arch as a daily driver for years. At peak, I've had five (5) total packages, with no transitives, installed from the AUR. Today I have one: sublime-text-4. It's perfectly possible--and extremely reasonable for many users, even power users--to live in an AUR-less world, or to use so few AUR packages that the guidance of "read what you're installing, doofus" is manageable and not onerous.
> New user registration was stopped on June 11 and then re-enabled after the project added Anubis to try to foil the attacker's mass account registrations. That did not work
This confuses me - why would a proof-of-work anti-scraping system like Anubis prevent registrations?
Implementing a bot to do registration is not a "copy as curl " click away anymore, and creating millions of accounts maybe become computationally expensive.
This is not much, but it could deter some low effort adversaries.
A side note, isn't package maintenance something that can actually be solved to some extent by LLMs? The prompt would be something like "Clone this repo and build this package while building/bundling as few other packages as possible with minimal code changes."
Then set it in a loop on all the packages for a particular system, I don't have experience in package maintenance and would be curious what kind of issues would come up.
Packaging for Linux distros is about review, following standards and conventions, authority, and responsibility. (And maybe also sometimes patching for compatibility.) LLMs can sometimes help with some of the mechanical parts, but the curation and trust stuff not so much.
And everyone does this individually you mean, rather than sharing the result as 'a package'?
It's an interesting idea, not sure I'd recommend it broadly, but if someone told me they prefer to trust an LLM than third-parties I'd get it at least.
Humble question: how do you find out if your system has been affected by a malware?
I know that for AUR there was a specific list of affected packages (that I checked, and haven't installed any of them), but I'm interested more in a general way. It could be from AUR, npm, or many other sources. Some malware could break and lock immediately the system, but other could stay there silent for months, so how to find out if there is any?
I haven't run an antivirus since I last used Windows 20 years ago.
The AUR really has been known to be low-hanging fruit for bad actors, which makes it somewhat surprising it took this long for it to be taken advantage of.
I have many opinions regarding this situation, but it mostly doesn't matter. AUR staff and AUR helper developers will figure out what they want to do, hopefully they will find a good approach.
But what I personally take away from this is simply that it has become worth it to target desktop Linux with malware. Or at least, moreso than previously. It is perhaps a good sign in some ways that the desktop is starting to be taken more seriously.
The bad news, of course, is that the Linux desktop is a bit of a train wreck in terms of security hygeine. It's getting better, and Linux does have the advantage of having some powerful primitives to exploit, but the desktop suites come from a totally different world, and I fully expect we'll also see more malware propagated through KDE's New Stuff integration (which goes through Pling.)
I'm not sure if it is that the desktop is being taken more seriously, or that its easier to write code that works on many distributions and configurations, greatly reducing the cost and increasing the value of the existing 'market'.
I would say that it is now very easy to steal 'AI' providers credentials this way. And then you can use them to write more malware or scam or use models for generating speech to call people and get them to 'redeem'. Or at leat to me this seems more sensible than injecting just malware.
When opening the printer configuration page in the KDE configuration panel, I was pleasantly surprised to see it's process runs wrapped inside a bwrap session. Cups is a bit of old and dangerous; I'm glad they sealed that off inside a sandbox. If you ask me, I would make this approach the standard for any software. The configuration panel for fonts doesn't need network access, so at least `bwrap --unshare-net`
I think KDE's approach is a greater danger. They both come with warnings, but with AUR (depending on tools) allows you to inspect the PKGBUILD. KDE just gives you a warning and no easy way of looking at what you are installing, it is not clear what contains executable code, and its enabled by default.
In general things that are not part of your distro's supported repos (KDE's AUR, language package installers like npm and pypi, Ubuntu PPAs, etc.) seem to present far more of a risk.
The AUR is effectively a pastebin for PKGBUILD files.
Some people (many of which don't even use Arch itself) have been treating and advertising it as something different. It's not a software distribution method meant for normal computer users.
And for those that aren't aware, a PKGBUILD file is just a bash script.
In case anyone missed it, the latest version of yay (v13+) supports being able to skip recently added packages through its new Lua extension system https://jguer.github.io/yay/lua.html#upgrade-selection-hooks. You can control the threshold since it's just user configuration now.
A bunch of common yay commands also return back the last updated time of a package thanks to https://github.com/Jguer/yay/pull/2846.
Hope Omarchy will make that a default:)
The thing is that hook is not enough: `UpgradeSelect` only applies to `yay -Syu` so it only filters the upgrade list.
Nothing protect you from a `yay -S foo` install and its dependencies. So this is not a guarantee or enforcement of a minimum release-age.
Actually writing this reply I went ahead and pointed that out in an issue at: https://github.com/Jguer/yay/issues/2883
Devil's advocate, except partially serious.
This is a good thing, because the warning about checking everything you download from the AUR, which has always existed, is now actually "enforced". People respond to consequences.
I love the smell of npm install malware in the morning.
Yes, feels like in those cases npm and bun are not far away. Coincidence?
I'll note that OpenSuse also has Packman which a shitton of people enable (for codecs), has also 'one namespace only' an looser policies than the main distro.
I do not think this something you can escape by switching distro.
Yes, the only reason this isn't happening in other distros is simply popularity.
Namespacing is the solution, and as mentioned in the article some ditros do indeed have namespaced user repos, like Fedora's Copr. The trust model of a flat namespace user repo is completely broken when the maintaining user can change at any moment.
Isn't Arch's AUR flat namespace quite unique? Ubuntu's PPAs are also not flat.
openSUSE's OBS and Gentoo's overlays aren't a single shared repo either.
Packman is more akin to rpmfusion, than AUR. OBS is the AUR equivalent for OpenSUSE.
"One namespace" is also technically true but doesn't work the same way with dnf or zypper as it does with pacman. dnf and zypper both make it easy to be explicit about the priorities of your repos and also to track which packages come from which repos and prevent that from changing. Plus openSUSE has a generously free public instance of the Open Build Service that you can easily use to host your own repos, and which hosts many individual repos you can add for specific purposes. When I ran openSUSE I always just ran my own repo there with only the extra packages I actually wanted, often just "forking" packages from repos hosted by well-known openSUSE developers so that I didn't have to manage updating the source packages myself but still didn't pull in the whole world from those repos and also didn't implicitly trust anything as loose as the AUR.
OBS is more like Ubuntu's Launchpad or Fedora's CO0R than the AUR. Random strangers can't take over the packages of others just because they go idle, and it's a bunch of separate repos, not one. Totally different trust model.
I use Gentoo. You have to specifically install "overlays" and every package maintainer would make their own overlay. You can't easily take over an overlay without the original person's permission.
That being said, still one namespace. Once you add an overlay it can replace any package it wants.
It's also Gentoo so too hard for most people to figure out.
Zypper at least has a notion of "vendor", so you can arrange things so that only the handful of packages you care about will actually come from Packman.
Ubuntu actually has first-party repositories with proprietary codecs.
Nixpkgs is a pretty comprehensive monorepo of packages with a more normal review process than the AUR, and it includes non-free software as well, plus the model with flakes for third-party stuff is that you trust individual publishers for their little repos rather than one giant grab bag repo of unreviewed content like the AUR.
RPMFusion for Fedora kinda has a similar profile, in that it's a shared repo for various things unsuitable for the main one, but it follows more or less normal Fedora packaging and review standards, doesn't it?
Supply chain attacks are possible everywhere and some distros have particular weaknesses, but the AUR really is pretty much uniquely bad here.
Nix also forces builds to be sandboxed. Now you actually need to run an infected build output to be affected.
Fantastic and anti-sensationalism write-up from LWN, as usual. They continue to deserve my monies.
Note that the AUR attacks were part of the larger miasma worm campaign, gradually trying to gain more control through various package ecosystems since the RedHat prototype campaign.
Mitigation Tool: https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma
Blog Post with details: https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/malware-insights-mia...
Well all of those attacks are just supply chain attacks, and it is basically exploiting people's trust. With LLMs, the speed and velocity of pumping out malice raised are now significantly faster.
It is so sad that every goodwill eventually got enshittified as well.
Despite that official Arch repos weren't affected in this attack, I would not recommend using Arch (or any rolling release distro) for anything that requires security. (Imagine if the xz backdoor targeted Arch...)
An Arch maintainer that I personally know once admitted that he rarely review upstream changes when bumping package versions. He only does that when the build breaks.
I can't blame him for what he did, since it's not reasonable to ask package maintainers to spend all their time on those stuff, especially in this "Age of AI" where more and more software are being aggressively refactored (or rather rewritten) and added more features.
What we can do is choosing a stable distro (like Debian) where packages are more thoroughly reviewed, and apply security practices (such as TOTP, sandboxing browsers and video players, etc.) even though they cause inconvenience.
> An Arch maintainer that I personally know once admitted that he rarely review upstream changes when bumping package versions.
Cool story bro. Assuming that's common, I have trouble understanding why Arch (non-AUR) is any more at risk than Debian--besides the latter being more popular and having more users/incidental testers, which is a real benefit if that's your goal, but has its own drawbacks (like older and known-vulnerable packages lingering for longer before updated releases are made available).
> it's not reasonable to ask package maintainers to spend all their time on those stuff, especially in this "Age of AI"
Aren't Debian and friends similarly at risk of this as well, then?
> security practices (such as TOTP, sandboxing browsers and video players, etc.)
I'm not sure if those are more or less prevalent on Arch; I know that many IDEs and GUI programs I've installed on Arch ran by default in Flatpaks or similar, and Debian/Ubuntu like Snaps, but I'm honestly not familiar with whether those ecosystems have significant and/or equivalent penetration in different distros.
Debian freezes the package versions on release of each Debian version and then cherry picks critical fixes for the rest of the Debian version's lifecycle. So even if they never review the code (and I don't expect them to), they're less likely to release malware before it's discovered by others.
That model is getting increasingly difficult and labor intensive, unfortunately. More and more upstream are abandoning the old school security advisories. Not many are isolating CVEs or security fixes into distinct patches, the fixes come with a version bump and often accompany new features or other bug fixes.
There's also plenty projects that silently fix security bugs without issuing a CVE or even labelling them. So now the maintainer of that packages has to monitor the commit logs, figure out if a particular bug fix has security implications and then backport it to the older version which is becoming harder and harder over time.
Unless you have a massive team or a big enough army of volunteers, the LTS model is becoming less and less viable over time, you are often safer on rolling release or close to it (something like Fedora's pace is good).
I like the Alpine model where they have a set of packages they maintain via the core team and everything else is in "testing".
You get a lower risk of them pulling in a bleeding edge vulnerability, but a higher risk that you'll get stuck with an old bug waiting for the maintainer to pull in a patch. Then there's the risk that in their attempt to cherry pick, they don't actually mitigate the issue (or introduce more issues based on how they diverge from upstream).
There's no silver bullets here.
> but a higher risk that you'll get stuck with an old bug waiting for the maintainer to pull in a patch. Then there's the risk that in their attempt to cherry pick, they don't actually mitigate the issue
Which is why the whole process is open sourced and you can get easily the source version of a package, edit it and rebuild it.
> There's no silver bullets here.
Because it's a trade-off, just like stability is, they're both software bugs in the end so mitigating them has similar pros and cons.
I don't think Arch maintainers are responsible for auditing upstream. They package the upstream only.
If you package software for a distro, you have some responsibility for reviewing what you publish.
If you distribute an update that has malware, that is you publishing malware.
> where packages are more thoroughly reviewed
Where are you drawing your conviction that non-rolling-release distro maintainers are doing a more thorough review of upstream changes?
> such as TOTP
What?
Alarming. The whole point of official repositories is they're trusted, since they are maintained by trusted people. If one can't trust maintainers to be responsible, then the official repositories are no different than the AUR.
It's a complete fantasy that Debian maintainers do a thorough review of changed packages. It's not a responsibility they have, and it would be impossible anyway (how many packages are there in Debian? How many maintainers are there?).
Who still uses Arch btw after this?
Is there another distro that has an equivalent of the AUR with handling you think is preferable?
AUR is fast and loose and doesn't do much "handling" by design, so it's hard to find any equivalent repo. But there's always a tradeoff between fresh (nixpkgs unstable, might be the closest) and tested (Debian).
AUR isn't just the testing repo of Arch; it's explicitly just an open spot where anybody can put up "here's a PKGBUILD for folks". I don't see how it's like either the Nix or Debian examples.
Well, Nix has NUR which is a direct equivalent but it's not nearly as broadly used and I assume "here's a PKGBUILD for folks" is already too permissive for you if you're asking.
There's no maintainer vetting process in nixpkgs as far as I know, anyone can own a bunch of packages. There are quality standards and it's not "here's a bunch of nix code for folks" but it's the next possible thing in the line after that.
It seems like you may have mistakenly inferred that I have issues with the AUR?
I don't; I use Arch on 100% of my personal servers, have done so for something approaching 20 years, and don't see myself changing.
But I treat the AUR for what it is: a place where anybody can say "here's a PKGBUILD for folks" and it's on me to evaluate it on its merits.
I was legitimately asking the person upthread what other distro they felt had a better model for this kind of sharing, because they seemed to think this was a reason for Arch users to jump ship and I was curious what they thought would be the elements of a better system.
The NUR was sort of convenient before flakes were a thing, but now that there's a really common convention for sharing Nix code few use it. I bet most people who came across Nix in the last 4 years have never even heard of it.
Gentoo
But let's hope we get this solved, like peer review model, vouch, or something
It is very good to be able to find build/install files for everything
Gentoo's model appears to be basically the same? Like the AUR, anybody can submit basically anything they want. The requirements amount to containing valid packages, having a bugzilla account, and putting your package definitions in VCS somewhere.
In overlays that need to be explicitly enabled. Not as convenient as yay yolo.
We can also add npm to package.mask.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:GURU
SlackBuilds.org is pretty sensible.
Opensuse OBS. Tiny bit better because the build environment doesn't allow a network and binaries are not allowed as far as I know. Fedora has a similar thing COPR. Both of these support building packages for other distros as well as appimage, flatpak etc.
With opensuse official packages also use the same infrastructure. It is actually quite fascinating and powerful. (I know a lot less about COPR but I would imagine it would be equally as good. Wezterm switched to that for its packages)
I still do, I just don't touch AURs anymore.
If you want something from the AUR, just don't be lazy, read the pkgbuild.
I do, I'm just choosy about aur packages I use
The AUR has consistently had warnings around it of 'verify the PKGBUILD', far more so than any other package repository that allows anyone to sign up. Probably the only notable difference is the ease of taking over an orphaned package.
The AUR is not the Arch package manager or repository. The main Arch package repos are managed similarly to Debian, or Fedora, or whatever--caveat Arch's nature as a rolling release, but in terms of vetting and ownership/security, the approaches are similar. pacman installs from regular, real, vetted repositories by default. pacman will never install from the AUR. pacman is the official Arch package manager and the only one that is provided with the main Arch distribution/install instructions.
The AUR is, as many others have pointed out, a deliberately un-vetted pile of random Git repos. Arch deliberately doesn't even ship with a default one-click installer for AUR packages; their published guidance is "git clone this stuff from wherever it's hosted and build it at your own risk". Plenty of third-party, non-Arch-blessed tools turn that into a one-click process, but it's not "part" of Arch itself--at least not any more than, like, curl | bash or directions on how to add rando websites to /etc/apt/sources.list.d is part of Debian and friends.
I've used Arch as a daily driver for years. At peak, I've had five (5) total packages, with no transitives, installed from the AUR. Today I have one: sublime-text-4. It's perfectly possible--and extremely reasonable for many users, even power users--to live in an AUR-less world, or to use so few AUR packages that the guidance of "read what you're installing, doofus" is manageable and not onerous.
I was not affected
I do. I just keep reading the diffs on the PLGBUILDs.
> New user registration was stopped on June 11 and then re-enabled after the project added Anubis to try to foil the attacker's mass account registrations. That did not work
This confuses me - why would a proof-of-work anti-scraping system like Anubis prevent registrations?
Implementing a bot to do registration is not a "copy as curl " click away anymore, and creating millions of accounts maybe become computationally expensive.
This is not much, but it could deter some low effort adversaries.
I see that, but the adversary wasn’t a low effort one, and didn’t need millions of accounts.
A side note, isn't package maintenance something that can actually be solved to some extent by LLMs? The prompt would be something like "Clone this repo and build this package while building/bundling as few other packages as possible with minimal code changes."
Then set it in a loop on all the packages for a particular system, I don't have experience in package maintenance and would be curious what kind of issues would come up.
Packaging for Linux distros is about review, following standards and conventions, authority, and responsibility. (And maybe also sometimes patching for compatibility.) LLMs can sometimes help with some of the mechanical parts, but the curation and trust stuff not so much.
And everyone does this individually you mean, rather than sharing the result as 'a package'?
It's an interesting idea, not sure I'd recommend it broadly, but if someone told me they prefer to trust an LLM than third-parties I'd get it at least.