/me putting my Rust (post-v1.0 era) historian hat on.

The list of (language-level) reasons why people liked Rust was already largely covered by the bullet points in the real original Rust website homepage, before some "community" people decided to nuke that website because they didn't like the person who wrote these points (or rather, what that person was "becoming"). They tasked some faultless volunteers who didn't even know much Rust to develop a new website, and then rushed it out. It was ugly. It lacked supposedly important components like internationalization, which the original site did. But what was important to those "community people" (not to be confused with the larger body of people who develop Rust and/or with Rust) is that the very much technically relevant bullet points were gone. And it was then, and only then, that useless meaningless "empowerment" speak came into the picture.

less likely to be insecure

Evidenced by?

requires reviewing all source code

This is exactly the la-la-land view of what distributors do I was dispelling with facts and reality checks. No one is reviewing all source code of anything, except for cases where a distro developer and an upstream member are the same person. And even then, this may not be the case depending on the upstream project, its size, and the distro developer's role within that project.

to make sure it meets interoperability

Doesn't mean anything other than "it builds" and "API is not broken" (e.g. withing the same .so version), and "seems to work".

These considerations happen to hardly exist with the good tooling provided by cargo.

and open-source standards.

Doesn't mean anything outside of licensing (for code and assets), and "seems to work".

Your argument that crates.io is a known organization therefore we should trust the packages distributed is undermined by your acknowledgement that crates.io does not produce any code. Instead we are relying on the individual crate developers, who can be as anonymous as they want.

Largely correct. But that was me comparing middle-man vs. middle-man. That is if crates.io operators can be described as middle-men, since their responsibilities (and consequently, attack vectors) are much smaller.

Barring organizational attacks from within, with crates.io, you have one presumably competent/knowledgable, possibly anonymous, source, and operators that don't do much. With a binary distro, you have that, AND another "middle-man" source, possibly anonymous, and with competence and applicable knowledge <= upstream (charitable), yet put in a position to decide what to do with what upstream provides, or rather, provided.. X years ago, if we are talking about the claimed "stable" release channel.

The middle man pulls sources from places like crates.io anyway. So applying trivial "logic"/"maths", it can't be "better", in the context being discussed.

Software doesn't get depended on out of thin air. You are either first in line directly depending on a library, and thus you would naturally at least make the minimum effort to make sure it's minimally "fit for purpose". Or you are an indirect dependant, and thus looking at your direct dependencies, and maybe "trusting" them with the "trickle down".

More processes, especially automated ones, are always welcome to help catch "stuff" early. But it is no surprise that the "success stories" concern crates with fat ZERO dependants.

Processes that help dependants share their knowledge about their dependencies (a la cargo vet) are unquestionably good additions. They sure trump the dogmatic blind faith in distros doing something they simply don't have the knowledge or resources to do, or the slightly less dogmatic faith in some library being "trustable" if packaged by X or XX distros, assuming at least someone knowledgable/competent must have given a thorough look (this has a rough equivalent in the number of dependants anyway).

This is all obvious, and doesn't take much thought from anyone active from the inside (upstreams or distros), instead of the surface "knowledge" that leaks, and possibly gets manipulated, in route to the outside.

While it may never be "enough" depending on your requirements (which you didn't specifically and coherently define), the amount of "review", and having the required know-how to do it competently, is much bigger/higher from your crate dependants, than from your distro packages.

It's not rare for a distro packager to not know much about the programming language (let a lone the specific code) of some packages they package. It's very rare for a packager to know much about the specific code of what they package (they may or may not have some level of familiarity with a handful of codebases).

So what you get is someone who pulls source packages (from the interwebs), possibly patching them (and possibly breaking them), compiling them, and giving you the binaries (libs/execs). With source distros, you don't have the compiling and binary package part. With crates.io, you don't have the middle man at all. Which is why the comparison was never right from the start. That's the pondering I left you to do on your own two comments ago.

Almost all sufficiently complex user-space software in your system right now has a lot of dependencies (vendored or packaged), you just don't think of them because they are not in your face, and/or because you are ambivalent to the realities of how distros work, and what distro developers/packagers actually do (described above). You can see for yourself with whatever the Debian equivalent is to pactree (from pcaman).

At least with cargo, you can have all your dependencies in their source form one command away from you (cargo vendor), so you can trivially inspect as much as you like/require. The only part that adds unknowns/complexities is crates that usebuild.rs. But just like unsafe{}, this factor is actually useful, because it tells you where you should look first with the biggest magnifying glass. And just like cargo itself, the streamlining of the process means there aren't thousands of ways/places in the build process to do something.

Debian (and other "community" distros) is distributed collaboration, not an organization in the sense you're describing. You're trusting a scattered large number of individuals (some anonymous), infrastructure, and processes. The individuals themselves change all the time. The founder of the whole project is not even still with us for example.

Not only the processes did nothing to stop shipping the already mentioned xz backdoor (malicious upstream). But the well-known blasé attitude towards patching upstream code without good reason within some Debian developer circles actually directly caused Debian-only security holes in the past (If you're young, check this XKCD and the explanation below it). And it just happens that it's the same blasé attitude that ended up causing the xz backdoor to affect PID 1 (systemd) in the first place. While that particular malicious attack wasn't effective/applicable in distros that don't have such an attitude in their "culture" (e.g. Arch).

On the other hand, other Debian developer(s) were the first to put a lot of effort into making reproducible builds a thing. That was a good invaluable contribution.

So there is good, and there is very much some bad. But overall, Debian is nothing special in the world of "traditional" binary distros. But in any case, it's the stipulation "trusting an organization because it has a long track record of being trustworthy" in the context of Debian that would be weird.

(The "stable distro" model of shipping old patched upstreams itself is problematic, but this comment is too long already.)

crates.io is 10+ years old upstream-submitted repository of language-specific source packages. It's both not that comparable to a binary distro, and happens to come with no track record of own goals. It can't come with own goals like the "OpenSSL fiasco" in any case, because the source packages ARE the upstreams. It is also not operated by any anonymous people, which is the first practical requirement to have some logically-coherent trustworthiness into an individual or a group. Most community distros can't have this as a hard requirement by their own nature, although top developers and infrastructure people tend to be known. But it takes one (intentionally or accidentally) malicious binary packager...

You don't seem to have a coherent picture of a threat model, or actual specific factualities about Debian, or crates.io, or anything really, in mind. Just regurgitations about "crates.io BAD" that have been fed mostly by non-techies to non-techies.

So, we established that "pulled in from the interwebs" is not a valid differentiator.

which has existed for much longer than has crates.io

True and irrelevant/invalid (see below). Among the arguments that could be made for <some_distro> packages vs. crates.io, age is not one of them. And that's before we get to the validity of such arguments.

In this case, it is also an apples-to-oranges comparison, since Debian is a binary distro, and crates.io is a source package repository. Which one is "better", if we were to consider this aspect alone, is left for you to ponder.

and has had fewer malicious packages get into it.

The xz backdoor was discovered on a Debian Sid system, my friend. Can you point to such "malicious packages" that actually had valid users/dependants on crates.io?

Why do you keep making these "no context" posts?

They read like random gibberish.

fastrand has zero dependencies.

And all external dependencies are "pulled from the interwebs" nowadays (in source and/or binary form), irrespective of language. This includes core, alloc, and std, which are crates that came with your compiler, which you pulled from the interwebs.

What serious Linux users buy GPUs based on raw gaming performance on release week?

I personally buy based on open-source driver support. And this includes long-term active support, AND developer approachability.

My current GPU is an AMD/Radeon one because of that. But I'm reconsidering my position when my next hardware upgrade comes.

I reported an AMD GPU driver issue to mesa once. It was tested, confirmed, and patched by a competent AMD developer within a few days. Now you have easily reproducible issues like this not even going past the testing phase after many months. And there are similar issues across all model generations.

If I were to upgrade my workstation next year, I would probably go with an AMD CPU and an Intel GPU, which is the exact opposite of my current setup 🙃. One should never rely on outdated perceptions.

You should be thankful it's not 18446744073709551615 days to go.

A reminder that the Servo project has resumed active development since the start of 2023, and is making good progress every month.

If you're looking for a serious in-progress effort to create a new open, safe, performant, independent, and fully-featured web engine, that's the one you should be keeping an eye on.

It won't be easy trying to catch up to continuously evolving and changing web standards, but that's the only effort with a chance.

Examples ARE usage documentation.

What value is this blog supposed to be adding exactly?
The fact that top-level and API descriptive explanations are important?
The fact that some projects don't have complete documentation?
To whom exactly would this be considered new information?

What’s interesting is that this problem is largely solved for C and C++: Linux distributions like Debian

[closes tab]