Comment by rlpb
2 months ago
There is another related growing problem in my recent observation. As a Debian Developer, when I try to audit upstream changes before pulling them in to Debian, I find a huge amount of noise from tooling, mostly pointless. This makes it very difficult to validate the actual changes being made.
For example, an upstream bumps a version of a lint tool and/or changes style across the board. Often these are labelled "chore". While I agree it's nice to have consistent style, in some projects it seems to be the majority of the changes between releases. Due to the difficulty in auditing this, I consider this part of the software supply chain problem and something to be discouraged. Unless there's actually reason to change code (eg. some genuine refactoring a human thinks is actually needed, a bug fix or new feature, a tool exposed a real bug, or at least some identifiable issue that might turn into a bug), it should be left alone.
I agree with this and it's something I've encountered when just trying to understand a codebase or track down a bug. There's a bit of the tail wagging the dog as an increasing proportion of commits are "meta-code" that is just tweaking config, formatting, etc. to align with external tools (like linters).
> Unless there's actually reason to change code (eg. some genuine refactoring a human thinks is actually needed, a bug fix or new feature, a tool exposed a real bug, or at least some identifiable issue that might turn into a bug), it should be left alone.
The corollary to this is "Unless there's actually a need for new features that a new version provides, your existing dependency should be left alone". In other words things should not be automatically updated. This is unfortunately the crazy path we've gone down, where when Package X decides to upgrade, everyone believes that "the right thing to do" is for all its dependencies to also update to use that and so on down the line. As this snowballs it becomes difficult for any individual projects to hold the line and try to maintain a slow-moving, stable version of anything.
I'm using difftastic, it cuts down a whole lot of the noise
https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/
This looks good! Unfortunately it looks like it also suffers from exactly the same software supply chain problem that we need to avoid in the first place: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/blob/master/Cargo.lock
Edit: also, consider how much of https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/commits/master/ is just noise in itself. 15k commits for a project that appears to only be about four years old.
"exactly the same software supply chain problem"
While the crates ecosystem is certainly not immune to supply chain attacks this over generalization is not justified.
There are several features that make crates.io more robust than npm. One of them is that vulnerable versions can be yanked without human intervention. Desperate comments from maintainers like this one[1] from just a few days ago would not happen with crates.io.
There are also features not provided by crates.io that make the situation better. For example you could very easily clone the repo and run
to check how many of the packages had human audits. I'd done it if I was on a computer, but a quick glance at the Cargo.lock file makes me confident that you'd get a significant number.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45170687
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