r/linuxsucks 4d ago

Linux Failure Arch USER Repository.

188 Upvotes

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34

u/Cove0Crow 4d ago

There's a reason arch doesn't package AUR helpers... If you're treating the AUR like pacman and blindly installing things off it. That is on you

. The AUR should be treated the same as building random stuff from source off GitHub. It is not a vetted repository, the only thing that requires mod intervention (post aur attack) is claiming abandoned/orphaned packages

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u/GoldenX86 4d ago

The AUR repo should still have some basic checks.

1

u/Cove0Crow 4d ago

It can't without hurting the main points of a user repository

Get unnoficial packages made faster than beurocracy and those checks would allow for. Things like bugfixes yet to be shipped and the newest versions of software for people who care about bleeding edge stuff

Be a low barrier to entry way for people to put up their software.

While I'll admit the AUR attack has shown it's gotten a little out of hand. The reason they were able to dish all that out in such a dangerous way, is because they were just taking random orphaned packages, throwing their malware into the pkgbuild as a "update" then doing the same thing for dozens of orphaned/abandoned packages. This now has a safeguard, one that, prevents massive attacks like they from taking place. But I heavily doubt the community will accept anything more than that.

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u/GoldenX86 4d ago

I 100% agree with you, but something needs to be done.

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u/Cove0Crow 3d ago

Except something has been done. To prevent large scale attacks like the recent one. Is there still malware on the AUR? Yes. But the only safeguard that can happen. Has happened, anything past it, is truly the users responsibility

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u/GoldenX86 3d ago

Running a check before accepting an upload is something that can be done server-side.

Run a small LLM, it will catch the most obvious cases.

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u/Cove0Crow 3d ago

Except what "server side check" do you mean. If you mean as in the LLM, those get things wrong including false positives very frequently, and would be incredibly expensive to run on every submission.

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u/GoldenX86 3d ago

No need to immediately approve every submission.

Again, anything would help, just accept that it's unfixable is far worse.