Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

This article really comes at some of the crux of packaging pains for many languages. The "distro ships the software" idea is something so many modern language toolkits are pretty far away from (and, as someone constantly burned by Debian packaging choices, something I'm pretty happy with as well). But without a good answer, there's going to be frustration.

When distros are charging themselves with things like security, shared libraries do become a bit load bearing. And for users, the idea that you update some lib once instead of "number of software vendor" times is tempting! But as a software developer, I really really enjoy how I can ship a thing with exactly a certain set of versions, so it's almost an anti-feature to have a distro swap out functionality out from under me.

Of course there can be balances and degrees to this. But a part of me feels like the general trend of software packaging is leaning towards "you bundle one thing at a time", away from "you have a system running N things", and in that model I don't know where distro packagers are (at least for server software).

> I really really enjoy how I can ship a thing with exactly a certain set of versions

Just curious, how do you handle security monitoring and updates when doing this?

I've been exposed to two major approaches:

At $FAANG we're on a treadmill where company CI force builds your stuff every time anything in your requirements.txt releases a new version (semver respected, at least) because in the absence of targeted CVE monitoring (which itself won't cover you 100%), that's the only practical way they see to keep up with security updates. If a dependency change breaks your project and you leave it broken for too long, peeps above you start getting autocut tickets. This leads to a lot of ongoing maintenance work for the life of the project because eventually you get forced into newer minor and eventually major versions whether you like it or not.

Outside of $FAANG I've gotten a whole lot of mileage building customer software on top of Debian- or Ubuntu-packaged dependencies. This allows me to rely on the distro for security updates without the churn, and I'm only forced to take newer dependencies when the distro version goes EOL. Obviously this constrains my library selection a lot, but if you can do it there's very little maintenance work compared to the other approach.

I'd like to hear how others handle this because both approaches obviously have considerable downsides.

To be honest I'm fortunate enough to where maintenance work by sticking to "the latest and greatest" for application-level stuff is not hard. For system-level stuff in general it's been about relying on Debian or Ubuntu stuff, but then application-level management for the top layer ("the application", so to speak). I've only rarely been in situations where Debian packaging outright meant we couldn't move forward on something (one funny and annoying one was gettext being too old, but gettext is so coupled with libc for some reason that we couldn't just compile a fresh version...)

The joys of not having to deal wit the extremes of any problem...

I strive for the latter approach as much as possible. I'm happy doing more work as a developer (like using a slightly older version of libraries or languages) to ensure that I build on a stable base that gets security updates without tons of major version api churn.

Keeping up with the 'treadmill' you described is perhaps the main job of a Linux distribution. See, e.g. https://release.debian.org/transitions/ for one example of how this can work practically.

Don't forget the third option: don't. Updates are necessary when the customer asks for them. Most customers won't, and if they do, they don't know they need an update if you compile everything statically.

Personally, the update story is why I find developing on Windows much easier than developing on Linux. Instead of hundreds of small, independent packages, you can just target the _massive_ Windows API. You can take the "living off the land" approach on Linux too, but it's harder, often relying on magical IOCTLs and magical file paths rather than library function calls.

Not that I think the Win32/WinRT API is particularly well-designed, but at least the API is there, guaranteed to be available, and only breaks in extremely rare circumstances.

I don't know where you reside and what kind of software you build.

With the European Cyber Resilience Act coming into full effect late 2027/early 2028 (depends on when it's finally signed) this will not always be an option anymore for a lot of people.

a) You'll have to provide SBOMs so you can't (legally) "hide" stuff in your binary

b) Security updates are mandatory for known exploitable vulnerabilities and other things, so you can't wait until a customer asks.

This will take a few years before it bites (see GDPR) but the fines can be just as bad.

> [...] "hide" stuff in your binary

While legislatively requiring SBOMs is obviously a good idea, it might also unintentionally incentive companies to hide dependencies by rolling their own. Afterall, it's not a "dependency" if it's in the main code base you developed yourself.

Not sure how likely this is, but especially in case of network stacks or cryptographic functions that could potentially be disastrous.

I agree that there is a chance this could happen. But as a business owner myself it's pretty simple: It's far cheaper for me to take an existing dependency, create SBOMs and patch regularly compared to having to develop and maintain these things myself. But I do get your point that others might make different decisions.

But the CRA also has provisions here as you have to do a risk assessment for your product as well and publish the result of that on your documentation and hand rolling crypto should definitely go on there as well.

Again... People can just ignore this and probably won't get caught anytime soon....

It’s extremely likely, verging on certitude.

In some ways, the pressure of requirements like this may be positive: “Do we really need a dependency on ‘leftpad’?”

But it will also add pressure to make unsound NIH choices as you suggest.

SBOM is already in place I believe for the financial sector, or soon enough. Add DORA going full in Jan 2025, and we have another legislation that no one understands and follows. Respect of the AI cloud act is such a joke.

Yeah, the ECRA is going to wreck badly organised businesses and it's high time.

I just hope there will be actual fines, even for "small" companies. GDPR enforcement against most companies seem rather lackluster if it happens at all. If the ECRA ends up only applying to companies like Google, it'll be rather useless.

> Don't forget the third option: don't.

Good way to have malpractice lawsuits filed against you and either become bankrupt or go to jail.

Source?

The Evolution of Legal Risks Pertaining to Patch Management and Vulnerability Management and Vulnerability Management

https://dsc.duq.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3915&context...

Why Are Unpatched Vulnerabilities a Serious Business Risk? https://prowritersins.com/cyber-insurance-blog/unpatched-vul...

What are the significant downsides of the first approach in your experience?

> This leads to a lot of ongoing maintenance work for the life of the project because eventually you get forced into newer minor and eventually major versions whether you like it or not.

Remember, the desire here is simply to keep up with security updates from dependencies. There is no customer requirement to be using the latest dependencies, but this approach requires you to eventually adopt them and that creates a bunch of work throughout the entire lifecycle of the project.

I think it would be pretty natural for a distro to run it's own crates.io/PyPI/NPM mirror to build packages against, and have a unified set of library versions for the entire OS that way. Maybe not even a server, maybe just a giant Git repo or whatever, filtered down to the set of packages they actually use. Have any of them tried this?

I’m not aware of any that have; this would require them to become experts in running parallel infra, in many languages and with varied setups, and would mean that they’re not longer self-contained. That feels antithetical to their goals to me at least.

I mean Ubuntu has a bunch of python libs. The problem is that you need to make a universe of mutually compatible libs, so if _any_ of the libs have old-ish dependencies, that holds back so much.

I think what happens in practice is package maintainers do the work to get things up to date, and so only include a subset.

Debian effectively does this. It doesn't actually implement the crates.io API, but when building a Rust package they tell cargo "look in this directory for dependencies, don't talk to the network".

As I understand it, the process goes something like this:

- Debian wants to package a Rust tool

- They examine the tool's Cargo.toml file to determine its immediate dependencies

- Those Rust dependencies are converted into Debian package names

- Generate a Debian package definition that lists those dependencies under "Build-Depends"

- When building the Debian package in an isolated environment, Build-Depends packages are installed, providing things like `rustc` and `cargo` as well as putting the dependencies' source into the "local dependencies" directory

- Cargo runs, configured to only look in the "local dependencies" directory for dependencies

- the resulting binary is scooped up and packaged

Is there some documentation on how to do this yourself? It sounds very useful for building software meant to be binary distributed.

The whole process seems to be compiled in this Readme: https://salsa.debian.org/rust-team/debcargo-conf/blob/master... How to use only local packages can be found in the last paragraph.

Is this documented anywhere?

See https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/RustPackaging/Policy

Is this automated? Does doing this manually do anything for Debian other than create a headache and a mountain of work?

If it were up to me, I’d consider carving off part of the Debian package namespace - like cargo—* for cargo packages, and just auto-create them (recursively) based on the package name in cargo. There are a few things to figure out - like security, and manually patched packages, and integrating with cargo itself. But it seems like it should be possible to make something like this work with minimal human intervention.

Yes, it's heavily automated.

Why not just vendor the source for each Rust tool separately? A lot simpler and more reliable.

The only downside I can see is disk space usage on the builder machines, but it's source code... is it really that big?

Generally distributions want to unify dependencies so that if there’s a security fix, they only need to do it once instead of for every program.

> Debian effectively does this. It doesn't actually implement the crates.io API, but when building a Rust package they tell cargo "look in this directory for dependencies, don't talk to the network".

That sounds close to what I had in mind, but I assume you run into problems with the finer points of Rust's dependency model. Like if I depend on libfoo v1, and you depend on libfoo v2, there are a lot of situations (not all) where Cargo will happily link in both versions of libfoo, and applications that depend on both of us will Just Work. But if libfoo needs to be its own Debian package, does that mean every major version is a different package?

That's the first question that comes to mind, but I'm sure there are others like it. (Optional features? Build vs test dependencies?) In short, dependency models (like Cargo's and Debian/APT's) are actually pretty complicated, and ideally you want to find a way to avoid forcing one to represent all the features of the other. Not that I have any great ideas though :p

Haskell has Stackage[1] which maintains globally consistent sets of Haskell packages that build together. It’s of course a huge pain to maintain, probably exponentially harder wrt <size of package registry> / <size of Hackage>. Also highly depends on whether the language and ecosystem helps and encourages library authors to maintain compatibility; I don’t think Rust does.

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

I think Debian's system should have a system only environment with their pre-frozen packages, and then a userland specific environment, where you can install any version of anything, and none of the system packages are affected by these software packages, but when you open a terminal for dev work, you can choose a more modern Python, or what have you.

I'm seeing an uptick in what they call "atomic" systems, where this is exactly the case, but last I tried to install one, it didnt even register correctly on boot up, so until I find one that boots up at all, I'll be on POP OS.

The way immutable distros handle it is by running those things inside containers using distrobox or the like. You can always do the same on a traditional system; just run your Python stuff in docker/podman on pop-os, or use full distrobox if you like.

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