ua-parser-js VS compiler-team

Just look at all the big companies doing it

https://faisalman.github.io/ua-parser-js/

This project is backed under MIT License, special shout out to project UA-Parser, as liguard uses a piece of its source-code.

With NPM, what's actually published is not what's in the git repo, so it's harder to inspect/review vulnerabilities or hijacking. With composer, what's in git _is_ what composer pulls (with the exception of rules in .gitattributes to exclude files etc), making it much easier to trace. One such example: https://github.com/faisalman/ua-parser-js/issues/536

Composer packages are vendor namespaced, so hijacking an abandoned package is not possible (and it is with NPM), some examples like https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/10/github_npm_package/

Sure, I suppose in theory it could happen with other ecosystems, but for some reason it doesn't. It sure seems to just keep happening in NPM though.

From the other side, npm package may be hijacked(as it happened recently for ua-parser-js and to other packages earlier). To mitigate that, I don't know, probably, subscribing to some security digest would be the most helpful.

On Oct. 22, 2021, developers of a very common NPM package, ua-parser-js, discovered that some attackers uploaded a compromised version of the package containing malware for Linux and Windows, and were capable of stealing data (at least passwords and cookies from the browser).

Since Neovim 0.5 release (which has full Lua support) I see more and more amazing Lua plugins being developed, and I think this trend will likely to continue. But I recently got more concerned about security risks associated with the way Neovim plugins being installed and used (especially after seeing recent compromises like ua-parser-js or coa). Installing typical Neovim plugin is basically downloading and executing random code from the internet on your machine with your user privileges, so hijacked or deliberately malicious plugin could potentially do a lot of damage (like stealing keys/passwords, installing keylogger or just rm -rf / for fun).

thread about compromise https://github.com/faisalman/ua-parser-js/issues/536

Are you talking about https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/688 ? I think that issue provides a lot of interesting context for this specific improvement.

And mips64, which rustc recently dumped support for after their attempt to extort funding/resources from Loongson failed:

https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/648

This is the biggest problem with the LLVM mentality: they use architecture support as a means to extract support (i.e. salaried dev positions) from hardware companies.

GNU may have annoyingly-higher standards for merging changes, but once it's in there and supported they will keep it for the long haul.

See https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/688

The work has been going on for some time now and it seems we are quite close to it being enabled as a default for nightly builds, I am super thrilled upwards of 20% faster clean builds and possibly more are on the horizon. Hope everything works out without triggering some unseen ICE. https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/681 Edit: If you want to discuss this feature reach out on Zulip

I'd recommend reading the MCP[1] they linked regarding the decision as well as their target tier policy [2].

They are dropping tier 1 support for Win 7 and Win 8. That means they are no longer going to guarantee that the project builds on those platforms and passes all tests via CI.

As long as it is feasible they will probably keep CI runs for those platforms and if interested parties step up and provide sufficient maintenance support, it will remain tier 2. i.e a guarantee that it builds on those platforms via CI but not necessarily that all features are supported and guaranteed via passing tests.

If interested parties can provide sufficient maintenance that all tests continue passing, it will be tier 1 in all but name. However the rest of the development community won't waste their time with issues like Win 7 and 8's partial support for UTF-8.

And once CI stops being feasible for the compiler team to host, it'll drop down to tier 3. If there's sufficient interest from the community towards maintaining these targets, in practice you should see comparable support to with tiers 1 or 2 however now any CI will be managed externally by the community and the compiler team will stop worrying about changes that could break compilation on those targets.

TLDR: They aren't saying "it'll no longer work" but rather "if you want it to stay maintained for these targets, you have to pitch in dev hours to maintain it and eventually support the infrastructure to do this because we don't see a reason to continue doing this". So if you care for these targets, you'll have to contribute to keep it maintained.

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/651

(The already broken) XP support was removed almost 3 years ago: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/378