Serde, a popular Rust (de)serialization project, has decided to ship its serde_derive macro as a precompiled binary. This has generated a fair amount of concern among some developers who highlight the future legal and technical issues this may pose, along with a potential for supply chain attacks.
    • dr_itor@programming.dev
      232·
      1 year ago

      TLDR: Forking is a hostile move, let us keep it as a last resort and start by communicating first.

      Since it’s open source, could someone fork off a drop-in replacement that compiles from source?

      Someone could, but it is much more complicate than that.

      You will need to convince every crate that uses serde (or at least every crate in your dependencies) to switch to your fork. And serde is extremely popular in the Rust community, you would be quite busy.

      You will need to reach out to every author of a crate depending on serde. Some of them will not be aware of this problem. Some will not understand why this is a problem. Some will agree with the current implementation. Some will refuse to switch in order to avoid splitting the community.

      And the split is going to happen anyway, because many will not switch due to these points.

      Then you will have to maintain such fork, which might or might not be a particularly time-consuming job for a particular project, but it is a job nonetheless.

      Also, just straight forking a project is a quite hostile move. The proper way to handle this is to contact the maintainer, ask why this change was made, and start a discussion arguing the drawbacks and asking to revert it.

      It is also worth mentioning that the maintainer of serde is very active in the Rust community, and they maintain a lot of other popular crates. Just to name a few: anyhow, async-trait, semver, syn, thiserror. They are definitely an important member of the community, and a very experienced one. They are not immune from mistakes, of course, but I think we would be much better off by talking to them than just assuming bad faith and hijacking their project.

      Diplomacy goes a long way, and I would be very surprised to find out that they are completely unreasonable with respect to this issue (from my limited interaction with them, they seem a rather decent person).

      Meanwhile, we can pin a version of serde that does not have this issue. There is no need to rush.

      • ck_@discuss.tchncs.de
        101·
        1 year ago

        The right to fork the project is granted to anyone by the creater of the project (who by the way is not the current maintainer).

        Calling a fork “project hijacking” means the person granting the right by license was acting dishonesty to begin with, wich makes me question who is acting in bad faith. Being able to modify and redistribute open source code are elemental freedoms the FOSS community thrives on. These freedoms do not mandate any reason and they certainly don’t legitimise anyones judgement.

      • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
        51·
        1 year ago

        The proper way to handle this is to contact the maintainer, ask why this change was made, and start a discussion arguing the drawbacks and asking to revert it.

        That has already occurred. The maintainer pretty much ignored the question, as far as I can tell.

        People usually behave that way when they have an ulterior motive. In this case, I worry that the plan is to slip some malware into that binary…

        • jhulten@infosec.pub
          21·
          1 year ago

          The maintainer took a very FOSS approach of “this is better and the tools we use don’t support better choices, so you’re welcome to fix the tools.”

          • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
            4·
            1 year ago

            If the binary matched the source code, that argument would hold, but it doesn’t, which is sounding alarm bells in my head. Just what is in those 600 kilobytes of machine code?

      • Anders429@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        Well said. I imagine that maintaining a project as ubiquitous as serde is not an easy job, and I’m sure dtolnay is no stranger to holding his ground when people disagree with him. I’m therefore not that surprised to see him holding his ground on this issue, and I think people should still continue the discussion with him instead of immediately forking.

        I personally think that proposing a PR to allow opting out of this (as is being hashed out here: https://github.com/serde-rs/serde/pull/2580) is a much better solution than forking. In my experience in open source dev, writing a PR often produces much better results than just complaining in an issue.

      • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        That’s a great answer - thanks. I agree that communication is the first thing to try. Realistically a fork would just result in multiple versions of the same thing kicking around, including the binary that worries people.

        Edit: Seems like diplomacy worked. The developer is removing the precompiled binary:

        https://github.com/serde-rs/serde/releases/tag/v1.0.184

    • sapient [they/them]@infosec.pub
      5·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been pinning my projects with the code in https://github.com/rust-lang/miri/pull/3032

      In particular, the important part is:

      # Pin a version of serde without intransparent unreproducible binary blobs.
serde = { version = "1.0, <1.0.172", features = ["derive"] }

      Which both avoids the conflicts an =version pin would produce and ensures all your dependencies with ranged serde versions will use a version without the binary if possible .