cargo-crev VS stackage

In other cases it may be more documented, such as Golangs baked-in telemetry.

There should be better ways to check these problems. The best I have found so far is Crev https://github.com/crev-dev/crev/. It's most used implementation is Cargo-crev https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev, but hopefully it will become more required to use these types of tools. Certainty and metrics about how many eyes have been on a particular script, and what expertise they have would be a huge win for software.

The main problem the author is talking about is actually about version updates, which in Maven as well as crates.io is up to each lib's author, and is not curated in any way.

There's no technical solution to that, really. Do you think Nexus Firewall can pick up every exploit, or even most? How confident of that are you, and what data do you have to back that up? I don't have any myself, but would not be surprised at all if "hackers" can easily work around their scanning.

However, I don't have a better approach than using scanning tools like Nexus, or as the author proposes, use a curated library repository like Debian is doing (which hopefully gets enough eyeballs to remain secure) or the https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev project (manually reviewed code) also mentioned. It's interesting that they mention C/C++ just rely on distros providing dynamic libs instead which means you don't even control your dependencies versions, some distro does (how reliable is the distro?)... I wonder if that could work for other languages or if it's just as painful as it looks in the C world.

For instance, the worst company imaginable may be in charge of software that was once FOSS, and they may change absolutely nothing about it, so it should be fine. However, if a small update is added that does something bad, you should know about it immediately.

The solution seems to be much more clearly in the realm of things like crev: https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev/

Wherein users can get a clear picture of what dependencies are used in the full chain, and how they have been independently reviewed for security and privacy. That's the real solution for the future. A quick score that is available upon display everytime you upgrade, with large warnings for anything above a certain threshold.

The metrics on crates.io are a useful sniff test, but ultimately you need to review things yourself, or trust some contributors and reviewers. Some projects, like cargo crev or cargo vet can help with the process.

You can use cargo-geiger or cargo-crev to check for whether people you trusted (e.g. u/jonhoo ) trust this crate.

There is a similar idea being explored with https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev - you trust a reviewer who reviews crates for trustworthiness, as well as other reviewers.

[cargo-crev](https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev) looks like a good step in the right direction but not really commonly used.

'cargo crev' makes this kind of workflow possible: https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev

The crev folks themselves are no fans of PGP but need a way to security identify that you are in fact the review author, so that's where the id generation comes in. Ultimately crev is just a bunch of repos with text files you sign with IDs. The nice property is that you can chain these together into a web of trust and it's unfortunate that vet doesn't just use the same signed files on repos model as a foundation because even if they don't trust anyone else, we could turn around and trust them.

Writing Haskell programs that rely on third-party packages is still an issue when it’s a not actively maintained package. They get out of date with the base library (Haskell’s standard library), and you might see yourself in a situation where you need to downgrade to an older version. This is not exclusive to Haskell, but it happens more often than I’d like to assume. However, if you only rely on known well-maintained libraries/frameworks such as Aeson, Squeleto, Yesod, and Parsec, to name a few, it’s unlikely you will face troubles at all, you just need to be more mindful of what you add as a dependency. There’s stackage.org now, a repository that works with Stack, providing a set of packages that are proven to work well together and help us to have reproducible builds in a more manageable way—not the solution for all the cases but it’s good to have it as an option.

> That is fine, as far as it goes, but obviously this will, at some point, be at odds with the interests of programmers looking to use Haskell as a practical, stable tool.

That's what Stackage is.

Stackage provides consistent sets of Haskell packages, known to build together and pass their tests before becoming Stackage Nightly snapshots and LTS (Long Term Support) releases. [1]

Java will never get this.

[1] https://www.stackage.org/

makefile_dir := $(dir $(abspath $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)))) export PATH := $(makefile_dir):$(PATH) project_name ?= project_main ?= src/.hs retag_file ?= $(project_main) stack.yaml: @test -f stack.yaml || (echo -e "This makefile requires a 'stack.yaml' for your project.\nYou don't need to use 'stack' to build your project.\nYou just need a 'stack.yaml' specifying a resolver compatible with your GHC version.\nSee https://www.stackage.org/" && exit 1) stack: stack.yaml @which stack || (echo -e "This makefile requires 'stack' to be on your path. Use GHCup to install it.\nSee https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/" && exit 1) .PHONY: stack warning.txt: -@uname -a | grep -q Darwin && echo "WARNING: On Mac, you must alias 'make' to 'gmake' in your shell config file (e.g. ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc). Symbolic links will not work." | tee warning.txt @echo "Add 'warning.txt' to your .gitignore file if you never want to see this message again." hasktags: warning.txt stack @echo 'stack exec -- hasktags' > hasktags @chmod +x hasktags @echo "You might like to add 'hasktags' to your .gitignore file." format: stack @stack exec -- fourmolu --stdin-input-file $(project_main) .PHONY: format retag: warning.txt stack @stack exec -- haskdogs -i $(retag_file) --hasktags-args "-x -c -a" | sort -u -o tags tags .PHONY: retag tags: warning.txt hasktags stack @stack exec -- haskdogs .PHONY: tags ghcid: stack @stack exec -- ghcid \ --command 'stack repl --ghc-options "-fno-code -fno-break-on-exception -fno-break-on-error -v1 -ferror-spans -j"' \ --restart stack.yaml \ --restart $(project_name).cabal \ --warnings \ --outputfile ./ghcid.txt .PHONY: ghcid

(why lts-18.28? it's the latest 8.10 release on https://www.stackage.org/ )

I don't see way community maintenance can change the GHC for nightly.

It makes total sense that it fails since at no point I requested that the library be installed, which makes me wonder: Is there any way to request Hackage to install SDL and GLEW before attempting the build? I see Stackage has debian-bootstrap.sh. Does something similar exist for Hackage?

At this point, you can try a Stack snapshot that uses an older version of GHC. Looking at Stackage, you can see that the latest version before 8.10.* is 8.8.4 (using LTS 16.31). Starting over with that snapshot, you find that the packages that you need are in the snapshot and work.

On the contrary, I think this is standard practice for packages which are part of stackage. When stackage nightly switches to a new version of ghc, all the packages which are incompatible with the new ghc are dropped from nightly. My understanding is that maintainers are then expected to fix their packages, at which point more and more packages are included in the nightly snapshot. The next lts to include that version of ghc is only released later, once most packages have been added back, so unlike ghc users who diligently upgrade to the latest ghc, stackage users who diligently upgrade the latest lts snapshot shouldn't see a big drop in the number of compatible packages.

I found the latest stack lts version, and it's associated ghc version here: https://www.stackage.org/