I think the argument is pretty solid as an alternative to writing PKGBUILDs yourself. Sure it doesn’t hold up for people unfamiliar, but Arch is build on the idea of getting yourself familiar with it.
Agreed. People should learn to read PKGBUILDs, but given how popular Arch(-based) distributions are, I do think many people won’t bother. Afterall, many people download random things all the time.
I would argue that it’s their own fault then. Laziness is not a valid excuse to put yourself so much at risk. If you start doing it consistently, it becomes a habit and won’t take much effort. Of course, the familiarity with PKBUILD syntax has a learning curve
But a peer-reviewing system would be a better approach in AUR. Weird that it’s not been implemented yet.
I guess it can be assumed that a good number of people read the PKGBUILDs, so at some point malware would be found. A peer-reviewing system would give people a false sense of security, since the AUR is a user repository, where breakage should be expected (compared to the official repos).
How would peer reviewing in a user repo be more a sense of false security compared to official repos? I don’t know any of the arch maintainers, so for me it’s also pure trust they don’t do shady stuff.
Peer reviewing would not be failproof for sure, but at least it would give more security than not reviewing the pkbuilds, and especially to those that aren’t too familiar with them
I don’t get all the noise around AUR being unsafe. Just verify the PKGBUILDS whenever you install or update something.
requires basic programming knowledge or at least some time to get familiar with PKGBUILDs, and then they have to take the time to read it.
Yes, I agree people should at least look up where it loads data from, but people are lazy.
I think the argument is pretty solid as an alternative to writing PKGBUILDs yourself. Sure it doesn’t hold up for people unfamiliar, but Arch is build on the idea of getting yourself familiar with it.
Agreed. People should learn to read PKGBUILDs, but given how popular Arch(-based) distributions are, I do think many people won’t bother. Afterall, many people download random things all the time.
I would argue that it’s their own fault then. Laziness is not a valid excuse to put yourself so much at risk. If you start doing it consistently, it becomes a habit and won’t take much effort. Of course, the familiarity with PKBUILD syntax has a learning curve
But a peer-reviewing system would be a better approach in AUR. Weird that it’s not been implemented yet.
I guess it can be assumed that a good number of people read the PKGBUILDs, so at some point malware would be found. A peer-reviewing system would give people a false sense of security, since the AUR is a user repository, where breakage should be expected (compared to the official repos).
How would peer reviewing in a user repo be more a sense of false security compared to official repos? I don’t know any of the arch maintainers, so for me it’s also pure trust they don’t do shady stuff.
Peer reviewing would not be failproof for sure, but at least it would give more security than not reviewing the pkbuilds, and especially to those that aren’t too familiar with them
You’re right, a peer-review system would be a net positive. Should updates be reviewed before publishing? This means updates take longer to arrive.
I honestly, really hope you’re being satire with this comment. Basic programming language, for a literal script, really bud’ ?