FYI: this breaks homebrew
If that flow was broken there’s only a handful of things it could be; specifically azure blob store or azure MySQL, but both of those should have layers of redundancy. Public anonymous download bypasses most everything else; no auth services, rails monolith, or metered billing. It does emit some events to the message bus for metrics, but that’d effect much more than packages if there was an issue with it.
As far as I’m aware this is the first time anonymous public package download broke since I left a few years back.
twice this year I've had to spend an hour or more with a user because a mirror was down. that's one more time than I've had to deal with a GitHub packages outage this year.
the latest was yesterday. they chose another pool of mirrors and the mirror continually chosen from that pool was down as well. finally I manually checked a mirror, made sure it was up and that signatures matched, then gave them that specific hostname.
the Linux package distribution system is not better. it's just different.
anonymous stuff on GitHub is usually limited to 60 requests per hour per ip address. if you're authenticated, it's several hundred if not several thousand.
Every office I've ever worked at has that one guy who is really good at tickling Google with scripts until it puts you all behind a CAPTCHA.
Anyone could just change username/organization and break thousands/millions of build.
GitHub redirects you to the new name in the event of a rename and you look up the old one.
In Python, we don't say "we don't host packages on a proprietary platform", we say "we have absolutely no clue where they are hosted and nobody audits them anyways, and we don't enforce package signing, and we'll just build from source with no build isolation what so ever, unless you remember to specify an obscure command-line option when installing... and have a nice day!"
Package signing is, well... I suppose that's another lesson from the '90s people will learn about soon enough. With a web of trust as broad as python or npm you'll just have everyone running around with signing keys and "trusting" any key they come across because none of it is built on personal relationships. When Archlinux asks me to confirm adding package keys, what am I going to do? Say no? I don't know these people, but I want my shit to work.
With systems like Python, I'd imagine that a solution to web of trust would be that some group of developers would organize a curated set of packages. So, for the cases where you need better security assurances, you'd use that. I mean, of course there's no guaranteed solution for the web of trust, but, in practical terms, something like that would be good enough for regulators.
There's already stuff like NumFOCUS. They don't particularly focus on the technical side of things, or endorsing more secure practices, but, in principle, they could. Maybe there will also be others once we have been bitten more times by some security breaches.
so it's not quite as bad as you're imagining but still not great.
fortunately GitHub is starting to require 2FA for very popular projects (starting with NPM) because of supply chain attacks like what you describe.
EDIT: I was wrong, the crates index does use a GitHub repo
crates.io also uses GitHub as an OAuth provider (and it's currently the only one offered), so if that broke then people wouldn't be able to publish crates, though downloading existing ones would presumably still work since you don't have to log in to do that.
[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/blob/master/src/cargo/sou...
[1] https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2789-sparse-index.html
[2] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/06/22/sparse-registry-testin...
[3] https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/01/30/cargo-spar...
The binary hosting at https://cache.nixos.org/ is independent of GitHub, and so are the old-style channels at https://channels.nixos.org/. The new-style flake registry used to be fetched from GitHub but has now been moved to https://channels.nixos.org/flake-registry.json. Admittedly in a new-style situation you’re likely to be using unlocked flake references that refer to GitHub (e.g. Nixpkgs), but it’s on you to lock them and pull them into your Nix store in that case.
Of course, you also get GitHub references for upstreams that host their code there, but that applies to almost any distro(’s build system) except the oldest of the old-timers which host the source for the whole distro on their own infrastructure, like Debian. (I happen think the old-timers are right here, but that’s beside the point.)
This is actually the second (maybe third; I didn't even know about GitHub's outage a week and a half ago so idk how Nix was or was not affected) time in three months or less that a partial GitHub outage or GitHub change has taken down Homebrew while leaving Nix unaffected.