attestation VS swift-corelibs-foundation

It's multi-pronged and I imagine adopters may use a subset of features. Broadly, I think folks are going to be interested in a) branch/tag/reference protection rules, b) file protection rules (monorepo or otherwise, though monorepos do pose a very apt usecase for gittuf), and c) general key management for those who primarily care about Git signing.

For those who care about a and b, I think the work we want to do to support [in-toto attestations](https://github.com/in-toto/attestation) for [SLSA's upcoming source track](https://github.com/slsa-framework/slsa/issues/956) could be very interesting as well.

I have. I actually worked a few desks down from dpc when he was creating it and we talked about it at length. I felt then and now that it has good goals but a very limiting implementation in that it does not pursue a portable spec and instead anchors a very opinionated format to git, and github, instead of cryptographic keys held in hardware owned controlled by reviewers. I want to see the same keys that sign git commits also sign reviews, for instance.

I think for broad adoption a review system should ask essentially the same questions as crev, but store them in a format like in-toto including signatures by the reviewers created with a user choice of pgp smartcards, ssh keys, or webauthn devices. These reviews would be anchored to hashes of a particular state of a particular tree of code and not to any type of VCS or distribution system. Important code is distributed via Perforce, mercurial subversion, and tar files depending if we are talking about big corps, or linux distro building blocks. A good OSS review system should be also be usable by teams in their internal proprietary codebases too if we wish to see wide adoption. Even for OSS we may wish to share some reviews as standalone objects privately while security embargos are in place, etc. Proofs should also be verified standalone easily from local cache, when github is down, when original repos vanish, etc.

Something that meets these broader needs will make it easy for large orgs with very different internal setups to participate and play nice with other supply chain efforts by the OpenSSF using in-toto for reproducible builds, etc.

My experience tells me we need something much more ambitious than crev, but crev proved to me many people have real interest in this problem which I really thank dpc for.

The biggest blocker for starting this project is the human review spec settling in in-toto https://github.com/in-toto/attestation/issues/77

a : https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main...

I wouldn't want to be the guy relying on this table advancement for this project. The fact that they're rewriting it in pure swift probably says a lot about the quality of the current approach.

b: makes absolutely no difference from a developer perspective. if you want to run threads in swift you're going to use gcd.

c: my take with all apple software tech has been to wait until they've dogfooded their own tech long enough to make it useable. Worked very well for me so far, thank you very much.

Correction: rewrite of PARTS of Foundation

There already was an open-source project to rewrite ALL of foundation, but it had stalled on the shores of having to re-implement everything:

  https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

The (shitty) old Linux implementation has been on GitHub for years.

Sigh... The traditional argument is that every dependency is of the same quality and trustworthiness of the language Standard Library.

If I use the SL, then I should also have no problem using some lashed-up chimera that has a dependency hierarchy that spans three continents.

Like I said, I'll do things my way.

For the record, here's a peek at some of the "worthless" packages that I use in my own work: https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware

Also, for the record, here's the Swift Foundation Library: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

It has plenty of open issues: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/issues

If every dependency chain can match these, yhen I'll be open to considering them.

As it is, I do use the occasional external package, but I'm picky.

CoreFoundation is (partially?) open-source and cross-platform now: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

Partly this is doable because although RFC 2616 specifies a max URL length of 2048 bytes, most browsers allow much longer, with Chrome and Firefox allowing at least 64k chars (that's what they'll display but it seems like more is happily processed), while Safari allows URL strings up to 2GB in size[1]!

[1] https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/b23d...

Regarding your point #3, Swift does indeed have an open-source cross-platform implementation of Foundation. swift-corelibs-foundation

Foundation is open source and (mostly) works on Linux. What else do you want to see “opened up?”

Foundation is not the standard library of Swift. Swift has its own standard library that is bundled with the language on all platforms that are supported.

And Foundation itself isn't written in Swift, a good portion is written in C.

> A significant portion of the implementation of Foundation on Apple platforms is provided by another framework called CoreFoundation (a.k.a. CF). CF is written primarily in C and is very portable. Therefore we have chosen to use it for the internal implementation of Swift Foundation where possible. As CF is present on all platforms, we can use it to provide a common implementation everywhere.

https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main...