You can still, and will always be able to use API tokens.
The gp was pointing out that the docs heavily emphasise (& therefore encourage) GHA usage & suggested language changes.
If people are confused about what they need to use Trusted Publishing & you're suggesting (begging) a re-read as the solution, that seems evidence enough that the gp is correct about the docs needing a reword.
With an attestation from GitHub I know at least that the workflow that ran it and the artifacts it produced will be 100% traceable and verifyable. This doesn't mean the code was not malicious, but for example it will rule out that someone did the build at home and attached an alternative version of an artifact to a GitHub release. Like how that was done with the xz project.
It is fine to not like GitHub, but I think that means we need more trusted builders. Developers cannot be pushed toward just GitHub.
Yes, agreed. This is why the docs explicitly say that we’re planning on enabling support for other publisher providers, like GitLab.
Edit: woodruffw is sitting here and thoughtfully commenting and answering people despite how hostile some of the comments are (someone even said "This is probably deserving a criminal investigation"! and it has more upvotes than this comment). I think that should be appreciated, even if you don't like Python.
It seems reasonable to suggest that advertising a solution for public use at a point in time when support is at <2 systems is not an ideal way to encourage an open ecosystem.
Again, I need people to let this sink in: Trusted Publishing is not tied to GitHub. You can use Trusted Publishing with GitLab, and other providers too. You are not required to produce attestations, even if you use Trusted Publishing. Existing GitLab workflows that do Trusted Publishing are not changed or broken in any way by this feature, and will be given attestation support in the near future. This is all documented.
Let this sink in: if it is possible to check attestations, attestations will be checked and required by users, and PyPI packages without them will be used less. Whether PyPI requires attestations is unimportant.
This points to a basic contradiction in how people are approaching open source: if you want your project to be popular on a massive scale, then you should expect those people to have opinions about how you're producing that project. That should not come as a surprise.
If, on the other hand, you want to run a project that isn't seeking popularity, then you have a reasonable expectation that people won't ask you for these things and you shouldn't want your packages downloads from PyPI as much as possible. When people do bug you for those things, explicitly rejecting them is (1) acceptable, and (2) should reduce the relative popularity of your project.
The combination of these things ("no social expectations and a high degree of implicit social trust/criticality") is incoherent and, more importantly, doesn't reflect observed behavior (people who do OSS as a hobby - like myself - do try and do the more secure things because there's a common acknowledgement of responsibility for important projects).
As a package consumer, I agree with what you've said. I would have a preference for packages that are built by a large, trusted provider. However, if I'm a package developer, the idea worries me a bit. I think the concerns others are raising are pragmatic because once a majority of developers start taking the easy path by choosing (ex) GitHub Actions, that becomes the de-facto standard and your options as a developer are to participate or be left out.
The problem for me is that I've seen the same scenario play out many times. No one is "forced" to use the options controlled by corporate interests, but that's where all the development effort is allocated and, as time goes on, the open source and independent options will simply disappear due the waning popularity that's caused by being more complex than the easier, corporate backed options.
At that point, you're picking platform winners because distribution by any other means becomes untenable or, even worse, forbidden if you decide that only attested packages are trustworthy and drop support for other means of publishing. Those platforms will end up with enormous control over what type of development is allowed. We have good examples of how it's bad for both developers and consumers too. Apple's App Store is the obvious one, but uBlock Origin is even better. In my opinion, Google changed their platform (Chrome) to break ad blockers.
I worry that future maintainers aren't guaranteed to share your ideals. How open is Open Solaris these days? MySQL? OpenOffice?
I think the development community would end up in a much stronger position if all of these systems started with an option for self-hosted, domain based attestations. What's more trustworthy in your mind; 1) this package was built and published by ublockorigin.com or 2) this package was built and published by GitHub Actions?
Can an impersonator gain trust by publishing via GitHub actions? What do the uninformed masses trust more? 1) an un-attested package from gorhill/uBlock, which is a user without a verified URL, etc. or 2) an attested package from ublockofficial/ublockofficial, which could be set up as an organization with ublockofficial.com as a verified URL?
I know uBlock Origin has nothing to do with PyPI, but it's the best example to make my point. The point being that attesting to a build tool-chain that happens to be run by a non-verifying identity provider doesn't solve all the problems related to identity, impersonation, etc.. At worst, it provides a false sense of trust because an attested package sounds like it's trustworthy, but it doesn't do anything to verify the trustworthiness of the source, does it?
I guess I think the term "Trusted Publisher" is wrong. Who's the publisher of uBlock Origin? Is it GitHub Actions or gorhill or Raymond Hill or ublockorigin.com? As a user, I would prefer to see an attestation from ublockorigin.com if I'm concerned about trustworthiness and only get to see one attestation. I know who that is, I trust them, and I don't care as much about the technology they're using behind the scenes to deliver the product because they have a proven track record of being trustworthy.
That said, I do agree with your point about gaining popularity and compromises that developers without an existing reputation may need to make. In those cases, I like the idea of having the option of getting a platform attestation since it adds some trustworthiness to the supply chain, but I don't think it should be labelled as more than that and I think it works better as one of many attestations where additional attestations could be used to provide better guarantees around identity.
Skimming the provenance link [1] in the docs, it says:
> It’s the verifiable information about software artifacts describing where, when and how something was produced.
Isn't who is responsible for an artifact the most important thing? Bad actors can use the same platforms and tooling as everyone else, so, while I agree that platform attestations are useful, I don't understand how they're much more than a verified (ex) "Built using GitHub" stamp.
To be clear, I think it's useful, but I hope it doesn't get mistakenly used as a way of automatically assuming project owners are trustworthy. It's also possible I've completely misunderstood the goals since I usually do better at evaluating things if I can try them and I don't publish anything to PyPI.
I really don't think this dramatic language is helping
The "reasonability" of this is dependent on your goals. If an open ecosystem isn't a priority, then your statement is indeed correct.
It always starts small: "Oh, we just want everyone to be nice, so we have this super nice CoC document. Anyone who distrusts us is malicious."
Ten years later you have a corporate-backed inner circle that abuses the CoC to silence people, extend their power and earning potential and resort to defamation and libel.
It is possible that the people here who defend this corporate attestation-of-provenance-preferably-on-our-infrastructure scheme think that nothing nefarious will happen in the future. Well, given the repressive history of Python they are naive then.
It just takes pip to add a flag to enable "non-attested" packages. And of course they'll name it something like --allow-insecure-potentially-malicious.