The xz attack shell script

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • pants

    The Pants Build System

  • > C/C++'s header system with conditional inclusion

    Wouldn't it be more accurate to say something like "older build systems"? I don't think any of the things you listed are "modern". Which isn't a criticism of their legacy! They have been very useful for a long time, and that's to be applauded. But they have huge problems, which is a big part of why newer systems have been created.

    FWIW, I have been using pants[0] (v2) for a little under a year. We chose it after also evaluating it and bazel (but not nix, for better or worse). I think it's really really great! Also painful in some ways (as is inevitably the case with any software). And of course it's nearly impossible to entirely stomp out "genrules" use cases. But it's much easier to get much closer to true hermeticity, and I'm a big fan of that.

    0: https://www.pantsbuild.org/

  • nixpkgs

    Nix Packages collection & NixOS

  • I'm not familiar with Bazel, but Nix in it's current form wouldn't have solved this attack. First of all, the standard mkDerivation function calls the same configure; make; make install process that made this attack possible. Nixpkgs regularly pulls in external resources (fetchUrl and friends) that are equally vulnerable to a poisoned release tarball. Checkout the comment on the current xz entry in nixpkgs https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/comp...

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  • deno-cliffy

    Command line framework for deno 🦕 Including Commandline-Interfaces, Prompts, CLI-Table, Arguments Parser and more...

  • conan

    Conan - The open-source C and C++ package manager

  • Conan is a package manager for C/C++. See: https://conan.io/.

    The way it works is that you can provide "recipes", which are Python scripts, that automate the process of collecting source code (usually from a remote Git repository, or a remote source tarball), patching it, making its dependencies and transitive dependencies available, building for specific platform and architecture (via any number of build systems), then packaging up and serving binaries. There's a lot of complexity involved.

    Here are the two recipes I mentioned:

    libcurl: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/r...

    OpenSSL v3: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/r...

    Now, for the sake of this thread I want to highlight three things here:

    - Conan recipes are usually made by people unaffiliated with the libraries they're packaging;

    - The recipes are fully Turing-complete, do a lot of work, have their own bugs - therefore they should really be treated as software comonents themselves, for the purpose of OSS clearing/supply chain verification, except as far as I know, nobody does it;

    - The recipes can, and do, patch source code and build scripts. There's supporting infrastruture for this built into Conan, and of course one can also do it by brute-force search and replace. See e.g. ZLib recipe that does it both at the same time:

    https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/7b0ac710... -- `_patch_sources` does both direct search-and-replace in source files, and applies the patches from https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/tree/master/r....

    Now, good luck keeping track of what's going on there.

  • conan-center-index

    Recipes for the ConanCenter repository

  • Conan is a package manager for C/C++. See: https://conan.io/.

    The way it works is that you can provide "recipes", which are Python scripts, that automate the process of collecting source code (usually from a remote Git repository, or a remote source tarball), patching it, making its dependencies and transitive dependencies available, building for specific platform and architecture (via any number of build systems), then packaging up and serving binaries. There's a lot of complexity involved.

    Here are the two recipes I mentioned:

    libcurl: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/r...

    OpenSSL v3: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/r...

    Now, for the sake of this thread I want to highlight three things here:

    - Conan recipes are usually made by people unaffiliated with the libraries they're packaging;

    - The recipes are fully Turing-complete, do a lot of work, have their own bugs - therefore they should really be treated as software comonents themselves, for the purpose of OSS clearing/supply chain verification, except as far as I know, nobody does it;

    - The recipes can, and do, patch source code and build scripts. There's supporting infrastruture for this built into Conan, and of course one can also do it by brute-force search and replace. See e.g. ZLib recipe that does it both at the same time:

    https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/7b0ac710... -- `_patch_sources` does both direct search-and-replace in source files, and applies the patches from https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/tree/master/r....

    Now, good luck keeping track of what's going on there.

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