If you crash your car, you are liable for the accident. If you aren't ready for that, take the bus.
More power = more responsibility
It's an uncontrolled free-for-all disguised as a watering hole. If they can't do the most basic of housekeeping it should not exist full stop.
The officially maintained repositories (which are part of a default installation) were not affected. Users need to go somewhat out of their way to use an AUR.
The definition files are all plain text and not especially complicated. It's not too difficult to glance at the file before doing an install to get a basic idea of what it's about to do, just like you should do when running a random shell script or cloning a random git repo. Indeed, most AURs are implemented by cloning an upstream git repo and configuring it so it can be built. The same basic threat model applies: Do you trust the install script? Do you trust the upstream URL whose code it is about to compile?
it would be better if there were stronger community moderation and review that has stamps i can trust rather than this idea that eyeballing build scripts is a reasonable security posture.
The only way you could possibly not be aware of the AUR's nature as an "uncontrolled free-for-all" is if you didn't read the Arch Wiki, and anyone who doesn't read the Arch Wiki should not be using Arch Linux to begin with.
"Uncontrolled free-for-all" is exactly the status quo of programming language package managers such as npm and pip. It's just as easy for total randoms to sign up for an account and push packages on those services as it is to push a package to the AUR. Only the AUR made the lack of trust explicit and part of the culture.
PKGBUILDs are not packages. They’re (user-contributed) instructions on how to build packages.
> available through the OS's repos.
No. The AUR is a platform, similarly to NPM or PyPI, that allows users to upload PKGBUILDs. It is not part of “the OS’s repos,” and it says that loud and clear, multiple times, including on the front page.
Because I didn’t go through all the blueprints and find the flaw that led to the crash. This is a dumb argument. It’s also the one the AUR appears to be making.
If this is not for you, that's fine, but it's been working very well for some of us for... decades, at this point? I'm not amused by the amount of people here wanting to turn arch into another Ubuntu, most of them having zero familiarity with how the AUR works, or arch more generally.
but it's worth asking why it's been working well. Has it been working well simply because it's been a niche ecosystem, or even because you wouldn't have known if it didn't because nobody did security audits?
The Arch distribution model, which operates like the Javascript ecosystem, as in having a barebones core and then a zoo of unregulated third party community packages does not seem fine these days. As it became more popular it has naturally drawn attention and from that moment on you're just screwed because you have no security infrastructure. Arch pretty much lived off security through obscurity.
And in particular with the popularity of these spin offs, I forgot what the name of the tiling wm thing is that got very popular, I think a lot of users are not aware that they're doing the software equivalent of buying medicine off craigslist
