Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerpint | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why we can’t have pip packages be published by username or organization, like

    pip install google/tensorflow

It would significantly reduce the attack space

View on HN

npm does something similar with their scoped packages. It fixes the problem for the top level packages, but you'd still have to contend with the transitive dependencies written by smaller organizations or individual contributors. In this case, you have to guarantee that no one involved in the dependency chain ever typos anything.

This is true, and wouldn’t remove the entire space of attack, but would still limit it to some extent.

Oh absolutely. Unless everyone wants to be cool and stop publishing malware, gotta take a defense in depth approach here.

"you'd still have to contend with the transitive dependencies written by smaller organizations or individual contributors" - generally these are the higher risk dependencies anyway and should probably be used with extra caution anyway.

Maven had this 20 years ago

quite why python refuses to learn from anything that went before it I really dont know

“Namespaces are one honking great idea — let's do more of those!”

It gives false sense of security. What about google_official/tensorflow

It would still be an improvement if companies make clear what their namespace is.

google.com/tensorflow (and you'd have to prove you own google.com)

not perfect, but better.

I've always been a fan of how Java packages do it where the TLD is first.

TIL https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/codeconventi...

Perhaps something like Docker hub where "official" images are like "/_/nginx"

So "_google/tensorflow" would be official.

"google/tensorflow" would not be (plus it would be reserved by default to avoid confusion).

What if the package is signed by a key available at google.com/pypi/key ?

Actually it should be not just a key but a whole TLS certificate, with references to a CA, activity dates, etc.

How would you know where you’d find that key?

Again Maven has the answer: if your namespace is a domain name you own, then the key needs to be available at a well-defined path on that domain (or as a TXT record in it).

one of main issues I have with java is how messy it is to import external modules. python is a breath of fresh air comparitively. introducing this kind of thing as mandatory is a step away from that

Reply on news.ycombinator.com