Conversation

When the left-pad debacle happened, I feared that people would conclude “dependencies are bad”. (Instead of the logical conclusion, which is “don’t allow dependencies to be deleted from package registries.”) That prediction turned out to be true. :(

Replying to

Not only deletion but more like immutability, and that is the problem for me of using github as the source of your dependency

kornel@mastodon.social

Replying to

and

In Cargo you can add `rev=hash` to git dependencies (and it's in Cargo.lock even if you don't)

Replying to

and

It's worth keeping in mind that Git hashes and signed commits / tags entirely depend on sha1 though. It's increasingly a bad idea to depend on any of it for security. Unfortunately, Git doesn't offer a solution and sources really need to be distributed in signed archive files.

6:02 PM · Jul 29, 2019Twitter Web App

Replying to

It means having a direct dependency on Git for fetching sources is problematic. Even if it ends up providing the option of a secure hash, it's not going to be consistently adopted and using this for verification in the first place is a bit crazy due to the order it does things.

kornel@mastodon.social

@kornelski

Jul 29, 2019

Replying to

@DanielMicay

There's no pre-image attack against SHA-1, not even close, not even theoretically close. Collisions are much more limited, and it's easy to detect files trying to use the only known weakness: github.blog/2017-03-20-sha

Replying to

That's why I said it's an increasingly bad idea to depend on it. It doesn't make sense to be building infrastructure today that depends on sha1 and has no real migration plan away from it. Creating a dependency on Git revisions or signed commits / tags today isn't a good plan.

Show replies