Our Software Dependency Problem

https://research.swtch.com/deps

by dmit • 7 years ago

405 171 7 years ago

research.swtch.com

Easily explained in two points.

1. Convenience at cost to everything else. Easier is generally preferred over simplicity. If the short term gains destroy long term maintenance/credibility they will solve for that bridge when they come to it at extra expense.

2. Invented Here syndrome. Many JavaScript developers would prefer to never write original code (any original code) except for as a worst case scenario. They would even be willing to bet their jobs on this.

RealDinosaur4• 7 years ago

For me (Javascript Developer), you have to stand on the shoulders of giants if you want to compete. Any code you re-invent is code you have to maintain.

I've found though, some engineers love to create everything from scratch, and this greatly hinders their ability to hire/fire as everything is proprietary, and usually not documented.

Most decisions are pretty grey, but for me, choosing to handle stuff yourself is never a good choice. In the same way as no-one should ever try and create Unity from scratch, no-one should try to create React from scratch. You simply can't compete with the support and effort of a global development team.

If you wanna learn though, that's a different kettle of fish. Reinvent the wheel all day. Just don't use it in production.

tabtab5• 7 years ago

Re: Any code you re-invent is code you have to maintain.

But the flip side is that any code you borrow you have to fix, debug, and/or replace if it doesn't work as intended. I personally find it far easier to fix my own code than others' code.

I'm not claiming one should reinvent most wheels to gain control, though, only that there are trade-offs for each. If you borrow code, you should have an alternative(s) in mind if it stops working in the future or key bugs are found in it.

For example, using a JavaScript date-picker gizmo for forms is usually not a big maintenance risk because there are multiple to choose from. If you had only one choice and that choice went kaflooey, then you'd be stuck.

Well, the user could hand-enter dates. For internal software that's an acceptable temporary work-around, but not for commercial software, because every customer expects a date-picker (and the HTML5 ones currently stink if you want mm/dd/yyyy formats).

In short, don't heavily depend on any external part you don't have a "Plan B" for.

ori_b• 7 years ago

Any code you re-invent is code you have to maintain.

Any code you pull in is code you are responsible for. And you aren't in nearly as a good position to maintain it.

alextheparrot• 7 years ago

There’s a nuance here that I’d like to dive into, though, as well. There’s a parallel that any code you don’t invent, I’d argue, is harder to maintain, if necessary.

Find a bug or want to add new functionality? You’re either now maintaining an internal fork or working through legal to get a patch pushed to OSS (Personal experience, but the idea of there being work involved with changing a dependency is still generalizable, I believe).

The result of this friction, I’ve found, is one of two scenarios. The first is that there is just a lot of glue code. This glue code bridges different libraries in an idiomatic way so that the team can now understand how different parts interact. The second method is the wrapper method. Every piece of useful functionality is abstracted out so that the wrapper writer can do additional things in between and also buffer API churn.

Even with that said, I often fall into the “If someone else can do it for me, I’ll manage this dependency risk” category, as I assume you do as well.

wtetzner2• 7 years ago

In the same way as no-one should ever try and create Unity from scratch

I don't think anyone is really trying to create Unity from scratch (unless they're trying to compete with Unity). But that doesn't necessarily mean you should just use Unity. Unity is complicated, and designed to be a general purpose game engine. Which means for any given game, it may or may not be a good fit. A lot of times you can get up and running faster in Unity, but soon start to hit walls as you try to do something more advanced. If you wrote your own engine, you would just modify it to meet your needs, but with Unity you end up trying to find workarounds for its shortcomings.

I also think your example with React is flawed. There's a big difference between left-pad and React, and I think the most interesting packages to discuss is the range of things between those two.

loup-vaillant3• 7 years ago

no-one should ever try and create Unity from scratch

Some game developers do write their game engines from scratch. I know of at least one successful example: Jonathan Blow, with Braid (2D engine) and The Witness (3D engine). Note that in both games, a generic engine wouldn't have worked, or at least would have required such an amount of customisation that it's not clear it would have cost less, or looked and felt as good. Sure, don't go rebuild a generic engine from scratch. But a custom one, tailored to a very specific use case? That's not such an obvious no-no.

Another example would be Monocypher¹, my crypto library. Why would I write such a thing when we already have Libsodium? The reason is, I saw that I could do better for my use case: an opinionated, easy to use, portable package. The result is massively simpler than Libsodium. I don't care that I cannot compete with the support and effort of Libsodium team. I made sure I didn't need to.

[1] https://monocypher.org/

simion314• 7 years ago

The issue I seen is problems like this

I need to make a thumbnail from a video

What a regular backend developer would do is to call ffmpeg from his language

What a JS/node dev does is to find a random package on npm that does that for him, maybe has no idea what ffmpeg is, has no idea that he can change parame6ters and options, he just reads the package readme, installs it and it's 10 dependencies and job done.

austincheney4• 7 years ago

I am a JavaScript developer fulltime for more than a decade.

you have to stand on the shoulders of giants if you want to compete

Hold on there cowboy. We are what we are. Nobody starts out as a rockstar coding ninja. It takes practice. Just take it one step at a time. Solve for problems as you encounter them. The challenge you go through to provide that solution will open your eyes to other potential solutions to other ever challenging problems you never would have seen otherwise.

Any code you re-invent is code you have to maintain.

If its code that has found its way into your code base you are maintaining it anyways. That is why dependencies are debt. If you have not reviewed the tests and/or validation of those dependencies you are introducing untested code into your application on blind faith.

hluska3• 7 years ago

I'm not sure how long you've been a JavaScript dev or how senior you are, so forgive me if this sounds condescending. For what it's worth, I'm genuinely not trying to be condescending.

As I matured into the profession, I went through stages of dependency. In the beginning, I wanted to build everything myself because I was learning. In retrospect, this was a good choice because I was way too green to pick a dependency and at least I knew my own code was crap. Then, I reached a place where I wanted to stand on everyone's shoulders - I agreed that any code I had to write myself was code I had to maintain myself.

Lately, I see all the grey in between those two points. I'd sooner not try to reinvent React because that would take me an obscenely long time. But, for more trivial things like left-pad or escape-string-regex, I've discovered that it's cheaper to implement and maintain it myself than to go through all the steps to vet a new dependency.

There's a strange place in this industry where rolling your own solution is cheaper in the long run.

spmurrayzzz• 7 years ago

There's a greater issue that is often ignored here. If React is so large/complex that one ought not create their own version from scratch (I actually question this assertion, but will grant it for the sake of discussion), it begs the question as to how risky it is to bring into your stack. How trivial is it to replace if its so complex? Vendor lock-in can be a real problem for teams.

Remember the React license fiasco? What if Facebook hadn't caved there and removed all the controversial patent language (by relicensing as MIT)? What if, as a matter of existential risk, you had to make the business decision to remove React from your app?

As such, I think the other component of this particular decision tree should include how much you become dependent on a particular library/module/framework and the consequent risks that introduces to your organization.

drinchev• 7 years ago

JS Code runs on so many VMs, which makes trivial things difficult. Imagine you have 10 different JDKs and you want to support all of them.

Of course you can write your own code, but you will be in a bubble then and "works for me" will be something that you say very often.

On the other hand maintaining this code means that you need to have quite solid tests for it, which means that it would be easier to just separated in a module.

Modules are published on npm. Yeah there are lots of them.

austincheney4• 7 years ago

When it comes to environmental concerns two general rules account for most of your design decisions: 80/20 rule and separation of concerns. Environment APIs should be well separated from the core of your application. That core of your application will get you the 80% value from 20% of code/effort.

On my open source projects, for example, I perform a huge ton of test automation. My application run in browsers, but I don't provide any test automation for the browser environment. I just manually test there occasionally. The effort is too high and the environment is so simple that I can get what I need from brief manual testing. Since the code that runs in the browser (and its documentation) is dynamically assembled maybe half the concerns there are solved by testing the code in other environments more conducive to test automation.

Rationally speaking you don't really need to provide 100% test coverage. You just need to provide enough tests to guarantee the application does all it claims to do.

Of course you can write your own code, but you will be in a bubble then and "works for me"

That is what test automation and feature tests are for. The application does all it claims to do or it doesn't regardless of whether you wrote original code or cobbled together various untested packages.

jayd16• 7 years ago

Is the package management story significantly worse for js/node than other languages or is it just a meme? If it actually does have more issues, why? Are the npm maintainers less rigorous than, maven central (for example)?

Java is lucky enough to have a lot of very solid Apache libraries built with enterprise money. Is the culture different for js and npm?

aaaaaaaaaab• 7 years ago

Java/.NET/C++/etc. people don’t have the urge to publish every other line of code they deem “useful”. They also don’t have the urge to import said one-liners when writing a helper method in 15 seconds is perfectly adequate.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

Java/.NET/C++/etc. people don’t have the urge to publish every other line of code they deem “useful”.

I do for my code sometimes, except I make GitHub Gists out of them instead of putting them on NPM.

LoSboccacc2• 7 years ago

java and .net also have a large, rich and dependable set of functionalities in their core libs

asark• 7 years ago

1) Crap standard library and core language, with lots of accidental complexity. These problems are fixed or (more often) swept under the rug many times over by library authors over the course of years, then eventually the core language/lib provides its own attempt at a fix, but by then there are a ton of implementations out in the wild and it'll takes years for a typical mid-size projects dependency tree to shake out all the "deprecated" libraries of any given feature like this, if it ever does. That so many libraries have to pull in other libs for really basic stuff bloats your node_modules dir in a hurry.

2) Platform incompatibility plus no-one actually writes real Javascript that can run directly on any platform anymore anyway, so there are polyfills for yet-to-be-implemented language features and compatibility overlays galore.

3) And yes a lot of it's just the fault of Javascript "culture".

justinsaccount• 7 years ago

Most js build systems don't do dead code removal. This ends up encouraging many small packages instead of bundling functionality into larger packages.

For example, there is a lodash package, but people don't want to include the whole thing, so now there is one package for each function:

https://www.npmjs.com/~jdalton

As far as I know this aspect is unique to nodejs/npm.

athenot• 7 years ago

Does the code have tests? Can you run them? Do they pass? Tests establish that the code’s basic functionality is correct, and they signal that the developer is serious about keeping it correct.

This is one thing I thoroughly miss from Perl's CPAN: modules there have extensive testing, thanks to the CPAN Testers Network. It's not just a green/red badge but reporting is for the version triplet { module version, perl version, OS version }. I really wish NPM did the same.

Here's an example: http://deps.cpantesters.org/?module=DBD::mysql

jrockway• 7 years ago

I feel like the production environment situation has changed significantly since Perl became popular. Now everything is run in "FROM alpine:latest" or whatever, and if it works once, it will mostly work everywhere. All the bugs that CPAN testers tried to find were platform differences like "debian puts /etc/passwd somewhere other than redhat". Yes, you will absolutely at some point encounter a bug due to some difference between Broadwell and Haswell or ARM and x86_64, so you can't completely ignore the issue. The regex to escape parentheses will probably work on ARM if it worked on x86_64. (I doubt the tests cases are likely to find this bug anyway, though it is sure nice if it does.)

SomeHacker44• 7 years ago

My opinion...

That implies too much faith in tests. Tests are no better or worse than any other code. In fact, writing good tests is an art and most people cannot think about every corner case and don’t write tests that cover every code path.

So, unless you audit the tests they add no practical additional layer of trust, IMO, to just using the “package” with or without tests.

nobody271• 7 years ago

Many times I've had the most use for a test that didn't fit into the conventional unit test format but I didn't try to get it approved because I didn't want to get into a dogmatic argument about what a test should or shouldn't be. A lot of what I worry about doesn't get tested well using unit tests.

jsty• 7 years ago

It might be that data protection regulations start to 'encourage' movement in this area regards more careful consideration of the software dependency chain. If you pull in a malicious dependency which results in personal information being exfiltrated, I doubt the "we pulled in so many third party dependencies it was infeasible to scrutinise them" defence is going to mitigate the fines by very much.

DoctorOetker2• 7 years ago

that is the ideal path, but sadly most things indicate the system prefers the opposite path, especially if we look at "responsible disclosure" where the contributor is expected to give a centralized temporary secrecy agency advance warning, and we blindly have to trust them not to weaponize what essentially amounts to an endless stream of 0days (or trust them not to turn a selective blind eye to malicious exfiltration of these 0days)

trhway• 7 years ago

15 years ago adding an external module was an endeavor involving approval forms, lawyers, etc. so that it frequently were much easier just to develop required functionality yourself. These days i still shudder seeing how the build goes somewhere, downloads something (usually you notice it only when whatever package manager being used for that part of the build didn't find the proxy or requires very peculiar way of specifying it - of course at the companies with transparent proxies people didn't notice even that ) ... completely opaque in the sense that even if i spend some time today looking into what is downloaded and where from, tomorrow another guy would just add another thing ...

tabtab5• 7 years ago

There used to be talk about how to increase "reuse" of software, and now that systems use masses of libraries, the down-sides of heavy but casual reuse are coming to light.

I'm not sure of an easy answer. Perhaps the libraries can be reworked to make it easier to only use or extract the specific parts you need, but it's difficult to anticipate future and varied needs well. Trial and error, and blood, sweat, and tears may be the trick; but, nobody wants to pay for such because the benefits are not immediate nor guaranteed.

OOP use to be "sold" as a domain modelling tool. It pretty much failed at that for non-trivial domains (in my opinion at least), but made it easier to glue libraries together, and glue we did.

jerf2• 7 years ago

It's not that hard. You just need to think of dependencies as something that has non-zero benefits and non-zero costs. The problem is that, as usual, whereever you've got a "zero" showing up in your cost/benefits analysis, you're overlooking something. Sometimes it's minor and negligible stuff, but sometimes it's not. Act accordingly.

One thing that I believe we will come to a consensus on is that there is a certain fixed cost of a dependency, analogous to the base cost of a physical store to manage the stock of anything that appears on the shelves no matter how cheap the individual item may be, and that a dependencies will need to overcome that base cost to be worthwhile. I suspect that the requisite functionality is generally going to require in the low hundreds of lines at a minimum to obtain, and that we're going to see a general movement away from these one-line "libraries".

I say generally more than a few hundred lines because there are some exceptional cases, such as encryption algorithms or some very particular data structures like red-black trees, where they may not be a whole lot of lines per se, but they can be very dense, very details-oriented, very particular lines. Most of our code is not like that, though.

tabtab5• 7 years ago

Re: It's not that hard

Do you mean creating libraries that are flexible and partitioned well for future needs? I do find that hard and almost no library maker I know of gets it right the first time. Analysis of current needs is difficult; analysis of future needs is extra difficult. Experience helps, but is still not powerful enough. The future continues to surprise the heck of out me. Tell God to slow things down ;-)

mrdoops2• 7 years ago

The way I see it, our over-dependency (sorry for overloading the phrase) on Javascript as the de-facto web language has the pendulum far in one direction. How much longer can we keep this up? What's the maximum capacity of a developer ecosystem before dependency-hell and framework churn reaches critical mass? This is still a complicated information system - how far can it scale? What's the breaking point?

There's so much amateur work and muddied merit-sense-making of what's good software, who to listen to, and how to move forward - my feeling is that pendulum is just about at peak.

k__2• 7 years ago

For me this sounds like FUD.

Sure, you can install a bunch of deps for every small problem, but you don't have to.

If you just take a bit time to think, you can roll your own solution for 90% of the deps, which are tiny packages anyway.

mrdoops2• 7 years ago

But what of the newbie developer? Is he/she going to just roll their own dependencies and do so in a way that's tenable? Green developers make up most of the category.

I guess I was trying to approach a few concerns beyond just dependencies: learning curve, conventions/standards, framework volatility, and merit assess-ability of ideas.

The more people involved (popularity), the greater the difficulty to parse the merit of an idea without pre-existing competence. How easy is it for a new developer to find a cogent way of doing things in Javascript land compared to a smaller more specific ecosystem? In the smaller ecosystem the experts are easier to determine due to a smaller population, whereas in Javascript-land there's so many people, opinions, articles, and conventional disparities; a much more challenging exercise.

LandR3• 7 years ago

This sounds like a problem pretty unique to Javascript, honestly.

I think if you saw a professional C++/C#/F#/LISP*/Clojure dev etc pulling in a dependency to do IsOdd you'd rightly laugh at them... Yet in JS, that just seems like an acceptable thing to do.

I don't understand why the standard is so low. Is it because of all these learn Javascript / Web development in 12 weeks bootcamps?

quantumwoke• 7 years ago

I much prefer Java's model of software dependency consisting of (for the most part) well-documented, large, feature-filled libraries distributed in an easily discoverable and maintainable manner (maven/gradle/...) to the dependency hell that is modern JS libraries. Hopefully newer languages like rust don't succumb to the same trap.

willtim2• 7 years ago

I once took a close look at a Java Web service application running internally at a large bank. It depended on over 3000 jar files, most of them likely transitive. When I queried the rationale of this, the dev team just shrugged it off as common Java practice. I do not think Java is in a significantly better place than the JS world with regard to dependencies.

rhacker2• 7 years ago

I am curious if it was actually 3000, or if that is embellished. I've been in about 6 java shops from Nike to startups, and the number is USUALLY around 100.

The reason is really simple - Jar files used to be required to download manually to add as a dependency. So there was a history of about 15 years of doing it the hard way. After maven was introduced, it took a while before OSS libs started adding other libs. Most of the time OSS libs are just including other Jars from their own organization.

baq• 7 years ago

Adapting Leslie Lamport’s observation about distributed systems, a dependency manager can easily create a situation in which the failure of a package you didn’t even know existed can render your own code unusable.

Gold right here. Makes me wonder what Lamport’s TLA+ could be used for in the problem area.

jasode• 7 years ago

Fyi, the article's title and sibling top-level comment by austincheney may give the wrong impression of what Russ Cox is talking about.

His essay is not saying software dependencies itself is a problem. Instead, he's saying software dependencies _evaluation_ methodology is the problem. He could have titled it more explicitly as "Our Software Dependency Evaluation Problem".

So, the premise of the essay is already past the point of the reader determining that he will use someone else's software to achieve a goal. At that point, don't pick software packages at random or just include the first thing you see. Instead, the article lists various strategies to carefully evaluate the soundness, longevity, bugginess, etc of the software dependency.

I think it would be more productive to discuss those evaluation strategies.

For example, I'm considering a software dependency on a eventually consistent db such as FoundationDB. I have no interest nor time nor competency to "roll my own" distributed db. Even if I read the academic whitepapers on concurrent dbs to write my own db engine, I'd still miss several edge cases and other tricky aspects that others have solved. The question that remains is if FoundationDB is a "good" or "bad" software dependency.

My evaluation strategies:

1) I've been keeping any eye on the project's "issues" page on Github[0]. I'm trying to get a sense of the bugs and resolutions. Is it a quality and rigorous codebase like SQLite? Or is it a buggy codebase like MongoDB 1.0 back in 2010 that had nightmare stories of data corruption?

2) I keep an eye out for another high-profile company that successfully used FoundationDB besides Apple.

3) and so on....

There was recent blog post where somebody regretted their dependency on RethinkDB[1]. I don't want to repeat a similar mistake with FoundationDB.

What are your software dependency evaluation strategies? Share them.

[0] https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/issues

[1] https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum/

teraflop• 7 years ago

Nitpick: FoundationDB is sequentially (strongly) consistent, not eventually consistent.

SmirkingRevenge• 7 years ago

A couple questions that I like to ask myself...

- How easily and quickly can I tell if I made the wrong choice?

- How easily and quickly can I switch to an alternative solution, if I made the wrong choice?

To contextualize those a bit, its often when trying to pick between some fully managed or even severless cloud services vs something self-managed that ticks more boxes on our requirements/features wish-list.

Also, its pretty important to consider the capabilities and resources of your team...

- Can my team and I become proficient with the service/library/whatever quickly?

davelester• 7 years ago

Re: other high-profile companies using FoundationDB in production, I suggest checking out these two talks from the project's community conference, FoundationDB Summit: Wavefront/VMware[0], and Snowflake Computing[2].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M438R4SlTFE

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkeyjFMmIf8

richardwhiuk• 7 years ago

If you can easily write a replacement for it, then the cost of depending on it is very small - because the worst case for the fix is replacing it....

jeremycw• 7 years ago

Worst case is more along the lines of a bad actor makes malicious changes to the dependency which you then unwittingly deploy to prod potentially compromising your entire system.

riyakhanna19833• 7 years ago

I wonder if the detection of such cases be automated.

cortesoft• 7 years ago

Or if the dependency disappears and breaks deploys

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/

smacktoward• 7 years ago

It's an interesting line of inquiry to think about how many of these evaluation heuristics, which are all described as things a person can do manually, could instead be built into the package manager itself to do for you automatically.

The package manager could run the package's test suite, for instance, and warn you if the tests don't all pass, or make you jump through extra hoops to install a package that doesn't have any test coverage at all. The package manager could read the source code and tell you how idiomatically it was written. The package manager could try compiling from source with warnings on and let you know if any are thrown, and compare the compiled artifacts with the ones that ship with the package to ensure that they're identical. The package manager could check the project's commit history and warn you if you're installing a package that's no longer actively maintained. The package manager could check whether the package has a history of entries in the National Vulnerability Database. The package manager could learn what licenses you will and won't accept, and automatically filter out packages that don't fit your policies. And so on.

In other words, the problem right now is that package managers are undiscriminating. To them a package is a package is a package; the universe of packages is a flat plane where all packages are treated equally. But in reality all packages aren't equal. Some packages are good and others are bad, and it would be a great help to the user if the package manager could encourage discovery and reuse of the former while discouraging discovery and reuse of the latter. By taking away a little friction in some places and adding some in others, the package manager could make it easy to install good packages and hard to install bad ones.

DoctorOetker2• 7 years ago

those are really good ideas!

a vague additional idea:

can we improve rough assessment of code quality?

1) suppose we have pseudonym reputation ("error notice probability"): anyone can create a pseudonym, and start auditing code, and you mark the parts of code that you have inspected. those marks are publicly associated with your pseudonym (after enough operation and eventual finding of bugs by others, the "noticing probability" can be computed+).

2) consider the birthday paradox, i.e. drawing samples from the uniform distribution will result in uncoordinated attention, while with coordinated attention we can spread attention more uniformly...

+ of course theres different kinds of issues, i.e. new features, arguments about wheiter something is an improvement or if it was an oversighted issue etc... but the future patch types don't necessarily correlate to the individuals who inspected it...

ALSO: I still believe formal verification is actually counterintuitively cheaper (money and time) and less effort per achieved certainty. But as long as most people refuse to believe this, I encourage strategies like these...

EvilTerran• 7 years ago

There's some relevant work going on in the "crev" project, discussed here a couple of weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18824923

The big idea is for people to publish cryptographically signed "proofs" that they've reviewed a particular version of a given module, allowing a web-of-trust structure for decentralised code review. I particularly like how, thanks to the signatures, a module's author can distribute reviews alongside the module without compromising their trustworthiness - so there's an incentive for authors to actively seek out reviewers to scrutinise their code.

DougBTX• 7 years ago

Badges on GitHub seem to be getting more popular, a manual way to show this information in project readme files: https://github.com/badges/shields

perturbation• 7 years ago

To some extent, R works like this... packages are only on CRAN if they pass automatic checks and there's a pretty strong culture of testing with testthat. You can have your own package on Github or external repo, but then that's a non-standard, extra step for installing the package.

zbentley• 7 years ago

The package manager could run the package's test suite, for instance, and warn you if the tests don't all pass

That's what CPAN does by default. It provides assurance, as well as invaluable real-environment test results back to package maintainers.

josephg• 7 years ago

NPM (nodejs package manager) has started doing that, revealing three combined metrics for each package in the search results. It assesses every package by popularity (number of downloads), quality (a dozen or so small heuristics about how carefully the project has been created) and maintenance (whether the project is actively maintained, keeps its dependancies up to date and if it and has more closed issues than open issues on github). The idea is that when you search for a package, you can see at a glance the relative quality and popularity of the modules you're choosing between.

Its not perfect - there's no way to tell if the packages under consideration are written in a consistent style or if they have thorough unit tests, but its a clever idea. And by rating packages on these metrics they encourage a reasonable set of best practices (write a readme and a changelog, use whitelists / blacklists, close issues on github, etc). The full list of metrics is here:

https://itnext.io/increasing-an-npm-packages-search-score-fb...

Sophistifunk• 7 years ago

There's a boatload more the package managers could be doing, but the problem is that it needs to be paid for.

tc• 7 years ago

The security of package managers is something we're going to have to fix.

Some years ago, in offices, computers were routinely infected or made unusable because the staff were downloading and installing random screen savers from the internet. The IT staff would have to go around and scold people not to do this.

If you've looked at the transitive dependency graphs of modern packages, it's hard to not feel we're doing the same thing.

In the linked piece, Russ Cox notes that the cost of adding a bad dependency is the sum of the cost of each possible bad outcome times its probability. But then he speculates that for personal projects that cost may be near zero. That's unlikely. Unless developers entirely sandbox projects with untrusted dependencies from their personal data, company data, email, credentials, SSH/PGP keys, cryptocurrency wallets, etc., the cost of a bad outcome is still enormous. Even multiplied by a small probability, it has to be considered.

As dependency graphs get deeper, this probability, however small, only increases.

One effect of lower-cost dependencies that Russ Cox did not mention is the increasing tendency for a project's transitive dependencies to contain two or more libraries that do the same thing. When dependencies were more expensive and consequently larger, there was more pressure for an ecosystem to settle on one package for a task. Now there might be a dozen popular packages for fancy error handling and your direct and transitive dependencies might have picked any set of them. This further multiplies the task of reviewing all of the code important to your program.

Linux distributions had to deal with this problem of trust long ago. It's instructive to see how much more careful they were about it. Becoming a Debian Developer involves a lengthy process of showing commitment to their values and requires meeting another member in person to show identification to be added to their cryptographic web of trust. Of course, the distributions are at the end of the day distributing software written by others, and this explosion of dependencies makes it increasingly difficult for package maintainers to provide effective review. And of course, the hassles of getting a library accepted into distributions is one reason for the popularity of tools such as Cargo, NPM, CPAN, etc.

It seems that package managers, like web browsers before them, are going to have to provide some form of sandboxing. The problem is the same. We're downloading heaps of untrusted code from the internet.

LoSboccacc2• 7 years ago

The security of package managers is something we're going to have to fix.

why the generalization? lot of package manager have been serviceable for decades, their security model based solely on verifying the maintainer identity with clients deciding which maintainer to trust.

look at the amount of security advisories that are just 'malicious package' - https://www.npmjs.com/advisories

this is of course an issue with all package manager, but it's the lack of trusted namespacing that makes it easy to fall into it. (there's scope which sound similar but the protection model of the scope name is currently unclear to me and it's optional anyway)

compare to maven, where a package prefix gets registered along with a cryptographic key and only the key holder can upload to it to the central repo.

sure you get malicious packages going around, but it's far easier not to fall into it because it's significantly harder to get user to download a random package off the namespaces he knows

We're downloading heaps of untrusted code from the internet.

this is not something a package manager can fix, it's a culture problem. even including a gist or something off codepen is dangerous. a package manager cannot handle the 'downloading whatever' issue, it's not reasonable to put that in its thread model, because no package management maintainer can possibly guarantee that there is no malicious code in its repository and it's not its role anyway. a package manager is there to get a package to you as it was published at a specific point in time identified by its versioning, and its threat model should be people trying to publish packages under someone else name.

speaking of which it took npm 4 years to prevent people to publish a package with new code under an existing version number: https://github.com/npm/npm-registry-couchapp/issues/148 - they eventually came to sense but heck the whole node.js ecosystem gung-ho attitude is scary.

marcus_holmes• 7 years ago

why the generalization? lot of package manager have been serviceable for decades, their security model based solely on verifying the maintainer identity with clients deciding which maintainer to trust.

What happens when the maintainer of a package changes?

The big problem I see happening is maintainers getting burned out and abandoning their packages, and someone else taking over. You might trust the original maintainer, but do you get notified of every change in maintainer?

faissaloo2• 7 years ago

This right here is why Go's 'statically link everything' is going to become a big problem in the long run when old servers are running that software and no one has the source code anymore.

reificator• 7 years ago

I find that Go developers also tend to have a 'vendor everything' philosophy which significantly decreases that risk.

At least the ones I meet tend to take that approach...

stcredzero2• 7 years ago

Given the ease with which the parser and AST are made available to developers, we should be able to implement tools which can detect naughty packages. Also, given the speed at which projects can be compiled, the impetus to keep the source code should remain strong.

Terr_• 7 years ago

when old servers are running that software and no one has the source code anymore

If only there was some kind of "open" source, so that it could be included along with the binaries. :P

I think the bigger problem is all the bootstrapping issues where you need "living" build systems to build more build systems etc.

Cthulhu_2• 7 years ago

It really depends on how the developers work; if they know the software will have to run for 10+ years, mostly unmaintained / unmonitored, they can opt to vendor all the dependencies so that a future developer can dive into the source of said dependencies.

Also, the Go community tends to frown at adding superfluous dependencies - this is a statement I got while looking for web API frameworks. Said frameworks are often very compact as well, a thin wrapper around Go's own APIs.

I've also worked on a project which had to be future-proofed solidly; all documentation for all dependencies had to be included with the source code.

TL;DR it's down to the developer's approach.

pjmlp2• 7 years ago

Go also allows to 'dynamically link everything' nowadays.

vinceguidry• 7 years ago

The security of package managers is something we're going to have to fix.

Companies that care about this already have dependency policies in place. The companies that don't care so much about security already have an approach to security problems that they will employ if a significant threat is revealed, spend time and money to fix it then.

It's a herd approach. Sheep and cattle band together because there's strength in numbers and the wolves can only get one or two at a time. It's extremely effective at safeguarding most of the flock.

thfuran• 7 years ago

Companies that care about this already have dependency policies in place. The companies that don't care so much about security already have an approach to security problems that they will employ if a significant threat is revealed, spend time and money to fix it then.

I think that probably the majority of companies actually fall into a third group: Those who don't really care enough about this but also don't really have a good policy for dealing with it.

herrvogel-• 7 years ago

If you've looked at the transitive dependency graphs of modern packages, it's hard to not feel we're doing the same thing.

Are there any tools to do this visually. I mean visualizing the graph and interacting with it.

robpalmer• 7 years ago

Yeah, you see them all really easily here:

https://anvaka.github.io/pm/#/galaxy/npm?cx=-1345&cy=-7006&c...

jancsika2• 7 years ago

It's instructive to see how much more careful they were about it.

"Much more careful" would have been a requirement to consult upstream on all patches that are beyond the maintainer's level of expertise. Especially so for all patches that potentially affect the functioning of cryptographic libraries.

Debian has had a catastrophe to show the need for such a guideline. Do they currently have such a guideline?

If not it's difficult to see the key parties as little more than security theatre.

Edit: clarification

debiandev• 7 years ago

Becoming a Debian Developer involves a lengthy process of showing commitment to their values and requires meeting another member in person to show identification to be added to their cryptographic web of trust

At the very least. More often people receive mentoring for months and meet in person.

this explosion of dependencies makes it increasingly difficult for package maintainers to provide effective review

It makes packaging extremely time consuming and that's why a lot of things in Go and javascript are not packaged.

The project cares about security and compliance to licensing.

int_19h2• 7 years ago

... the increasing tendency for a project's transitive dependencies to contain two or more libraries that do the same thing. When dependencies were more expensive and consequently larger, there was more pressure for an ecosystem to settle on one package for a task. Now there might be a dozen popular packages for fancy error handling and your direct and transitive dependencies might have picked any set of them.

It's not just a security problem. It also hampers composition, because when two libraries talk about the same concept in different "terms"/objects/APIs (because they rely on two different other libraries to wrap it), you have to write a bridge to make them talk to each other.

That's why large standard libraries are beneficial - they define the common vocabulary that third-party libraries can then use in their API surface to allow them to interoperate smoothly.

pier25• 7 years ago

After using Go and Dart on a number of projects and using very few dependencies (compared to JavaScript projects) I'd say a good starting point is having a great standard library.

For example, it's a bit ridiculous that in 2019 we cannot decode a JWT using a simple browser API, still need Moment for time and date operations, there is no observable type (a 4 year old proposal is still in draft stage), and still no native data-binding.

The TC39 is moving too slowly and that's one of the reasons why NPM is so popular.

ummonk2• 7 years ago

I mean, even all of those examples you listed aren't as crazy as the fact that you need a library to parse the cookie string and deal with individual cookies...

acutesoftware• 7 years ago

I'd say a good starting point is having a great standard library.

True, and at this stage, I am also playing with Javascript dates and timezones and I would be happy with a mediocre standard library.

ndnxhs• 7 years ago

I'm a big fan of kitchen sink frameworks for this reason. Whenever I want to do something in JS the answer is to install a package for it. When I want to do something in rails the answer is its built in. I have installed far far fewer packages for my back end than the frontend and the back end is vastly more complex

pjmlp2• 7 years ago

Same here.

Turbo Vision, Clipper, OWL, MFC, Forms, JEE, ASP.NET, Liferay, Sitecore,...

I don't have patient to play hunt the dependency game, followed by get all of them to play well together.

_pmf_• 7 years ago

The security of package managers is something we're going to have to fix.

Inclusiveness and the need for Jeff Freshman and Jane Sophomore to have a list of 126 GitHub repos before beginning their application process for an intern job is at odds with having vetted entities as package providers.

When I was developing Eclipse RCP products, I had three or five entities that provided signed packages I used as dependencies.

Plus: with npm, you even have tooling dependencies, so the former theoretical threat of a malicious compiler injecting malware is now the sad reality[0].

I'm not claiming the "old way" is secure, but the "new way" is insecure by design and by policy (inclusiveness, gatekeeping as fireable offense).

[0] I have tooling dependencies in Gradle and Maven too, but again, these are by large vendors and not by some random resume padding GitHub user.

gousiosg• 7 years ago

Here is some recent research where we are trying to solve the security and update issues in Rust/Cargo:

https://pure.tudelft.nl/portal/files/46926997/main2.pdf

TLDR: it boils down to analysing dependencies at the level of the callgraph; but building those callgraphs isn't easy. The benefit in the security use case is ~3x increased accuracy when identifying vulnerable packages (by eliminating false positives).

jackfoxy• 7 years ago

I ran across a great quote that sums up the situation.

...functionality is an asset, but code is a liability.

http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-progra...

Don't know if the OP came up with it himself, but he is now a candidate for the California State Senate.

adgasf• 7 years ago

Great article.

Some thoughts (mostly informed from design of Buckaroo https://github.com/LoopPerfect/buckaroo/ ):

- Cost of creating a package must be low (ideally the package just lives in source control). This encourages code reuse and therefore testing.

- Verification of changes must be easy. Git is a great tool for this - we can review patches between versions, rather than whole versions at once.

- It should be easy to extract dependency graph (including transitive deps) so that you analyze who you are trusting.

- There must be a verifiable chain from package source to package bundle (NPM fails here, do you really know the source code reviewed on GitHub is what went into the bundle on the NPM registry)? Better yet, have no bundles at all, just source code + build instructions.

- Reproducible installations (usually implemented via lock-files) are critical. Many package managers have lock-files that do not actually give reproducible installs. Beware!

- Package builds must be isolated from each-other (otherwise one package might tamper with another; I believe this is possible in NPM packages)

raphlinus2• 7 years ago

My personal sense, from watching developments in this space, is that we are going to have to find some way for taking on an open source dependency to be an economic transaction, with money actually changing hands. With open source, the code itself is free (in both the libre and gratis sense), but there are other places to identify value. One of them is chain of custody - is there an actual, somewhat responsible human being behind that package? Many of the most dramatic recent failures are of this nature.

Other value is in the form of security analysis / fuzzing, etc. This is real work and there should be ways to fund it.

I think the nature of business today is at a fork. Much of it seems to be scams, organized around creating the illusion of value and capturing as much of it as possible. The spirit of open source is the opposite, creating huge value and being quite inefficient at capturing it. I can see both strands prevailing. If the former, it could choke off open source innovation, and line the pockets of self-appointed gatekeepers. If the latter, we could end up with a sustainable model. I truly don't know where we'll end up.

skybrian• 7 years ago

On the other hand, it seems like making automatic payments to dependencies would be easy to screw up. Adding money to a system in the wrong way tends to attract scammers and thieves, requiring more security vigilance, while also giving people incentives to take shortcuts to make money. (Consider Internet ads, SEO, and cryptocurrency.)

Monetary incentives can be powerful and dangerous. They raise the stakes. You need to be careful when designing a system that you don't screw them up, and this can be difficult. Sometimes it can be easier to insulate people from bad incentives than to design unambiguously good incentives.

raphlinus2• 7 years ago

Absolutely. Two other negative models are the music publishing industry and academic publishing. I was going to write "paywalled academic publishing," but some of the worst ethics are in the predatory open access space.

There's an opportunity. Paying an open source developer a living wage in return for taking some responsibility for security and updates is a reasonable thing, and would obviously benefit everyone all around. Whether we can actually get there is another question.

x0x02• 7 years ago

A counterpoint: the system has already attracted scammers. see eg the bitcoin injection in npm. And now that someone smart has blazed the way and demonstrated the opportunity, others are sure to follow.

sevensor• 7 years ago

ActiveState has had this business model for quite a while. Even though you can download everything from PyPI, ActiveState has customers who are happy to pay someone else to take responsibility for dependencies.

x0x02• 7 years ago

We desperately need people using packages to pay. Otherwise it's nothing but a bunch of companies issuing demands to often unpaid people who build / maintain our shared code in these packages.

I will personally cop to having received an email complaining about a broken test in code I shared with the world and writing a less than polite email back. The code is freely given; that does not come with any obligations on my behalf.

erlend_sh• 7 years ago

Tidelift is doing exactly this. https://tidelift.com

peteforde6• 7 years ago

This paper lends significant legitimacy to a casual observation that I've been concerned about for a long time: as the standard for what deserves to be a module gets ever-lowered, the law of diminishing returns kicks in really hard.

The package managers for Ruby, C#, Perl, Python etc offer ~100k modules. This offers strong evidence that most developer ecosystems produce (and occasionally maintain) a predictable number of useful Things. If npm has 750k+ modules available, that suggests that the standard for what constitutes a valuable quantity of functionality is 7.5X lower in the JS community. Given that every dependency increases your potential for multi-dimensional technical risk, this seems like it should be cause for reflection. It's not an abstract risk, either... as anyone who used left-pad circa 2016 can attest.

When I create a new Rails 5.2 app, the dependency tree is 70 gems and most of them are stable to mature. When I create-react-app and see that there's 1014 items in node_modules, I have no idea what most of them actually do. And let's not forget: that's just the View layer of your fancy JS app.

mschuster91• 7 years ago

If npm has 750k+ modules available, that suggests that the standard for what constitutes a valuable quantity of functionality is 7.5X lower in the JS community.

Or that JS lacks a decent stdlib! As evidenced by the left-pad fiasco, JS simply lacks things that are either available by default in other languages or easily include-able from the system libc (in c/c++).

maxxxxx2• 7 years ago

Totally agree. If JS had only a decent standard lib for string, collections and math I bet the number of packages would be reduced by a lot. I wonder what the reception of such a thing in NPM would be. Would people appreciate having only one, but larger dependency?

jrochkind13• 7 years ago

When I create a new rails 5.2.2 app, I see 79 dependencies in entire tree. Which is about what you said, and a lot less than 1014, sure.

There are various reasons other than "low standards" that the JS ecosystem has developed to encourage even more massive dependency trees.

One is that JS projects like this are delivered to the browser. If I want one function from, say, underscore (remember that?), but depend on all of it... do i end up shipping all of it to the browser to use one function? That would be unfortunate. Newer tools mean not necessarily, but it can be tricky, and some of this culture developed before those tools.

But from this can develop a community culture of why _shouldn't_ I minimize the weight of dependencies? If some people only want one function and others only another, shouldn't they be separate dependencies so they can do that? And not expose themselves to possible bugs or security problems in all that other code they don't want? If dependencies can be dangeorus... isn't it better to have _surgical_ dependencies including only exactly what you need so you can take less of them? (Makes sense at first, but of course when you have 1000 of those "surgical" dependencies, it kind of breaks down).

Another, like someone else said, is that JS in the browser has very little stdlib/built in functions.

Another is tooling. The dependency trees were getting unmanageable in ruby before bundler was created (which inspired advanced dependency management features in most of the rest subsequent). We probably couldn't have as many dependencies as even Rails has without bundler. Your dependency complexity is limited by tooling support; but then when tooling support comes, it gives you a whole new level of dependency management problems that come with the crazy things the tooling let you do.

These things all feed back on each other back and forth.

I'm not saying it isn't giving rise to very real problems. But it's not just an issue of people having low standards or something.

peteforde6• 7 years ago

You are correct, sir: 79 dependencies. Need more coffee!

The influence of Bundler is just another example of Yehuda Katz doing something initially perceived as unpopular having a massive long-term impact on developer ecosystems. He is the Erdős of the web dev world. I wish he would sell options on his future endeavours like David Bowie did.

Anyhow, in trying to keep my initial comment relatively brief, I held back on several points; what I really and truly don't get about the 750k thing is how anyone can track the libraries available. You know... with their brains. In Rails, gems are big ideas: authentication, an ORM, the ability to address all of AWS, send tweets. The idea that someone would even think to publish a "left-pad" (which I understand is just missing from the also-missing stdlib) as something people should import is what seems crazy. What makes you stop and think... wait, I'm typing too many characters, I need to see if there's anything on Github that can insert spaces at the beginning of a string. How would you even know what it's called? Is there a module for concatenating two strings? When does it become silly?

How is it possible that finding a library to add padding which may or may not exist, doing even cursory code review and integrating it not take longer than just writing a few lines of code?

Using the example of the escape-string-regexp module mentioned in the whitepaper... this would be a deeply flawed thing to add to your project. It has a hard-coded error message that has zero affordances for localization strategies. It is, at best, a few random lines from someone's hobby app.

If every one of those 1014 modules in an empty project have weird, unknown-unknown failure modes, that sounds like a recipe for trouble.

Finally, 1014 packages getting frequently version bumped is way less reliable in terms of unfortunate conflicts. Your surface area of all things that can go wrong shoots up and to the right... all to save a few lines of code?

gr__or• 7 years ago

that suggests that the standard for what constitutes a valuable quantity of functionality is 7.5X lower in the JS community.

Err, does it? The first thing this suggests is that the JS community is 7.5x larger (true for Ruby, even larger factor for Perl and not true for Pyhthon [1]). The second thing this suggests to me is that npm is X times more usable than those languages package managers, which from my experience true for Python (not for Ruby though, dunno about Perl).

1 - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology

peteforde6• 7 years ago

I'm not trying be argumentative, but I honestly don't see how you conclude that 7.5x more packages === 7.5x more usuable.

I don't have a huge amount of experience with pip or artisan, but they seemed roughly similar to both rpm and bundler in terms of concept and operation. You have a file with a list of modules to require, an executable tool that downloads all of those modules and their dependencies and finally a generated file that tracks the snapshot state of all dependencies.

I don't perceive npm bringing 7.5x game to that evaluation.

Don't get me wrong: I'm thrilled that it's working for so many people. Java was officially working for people when Rails became popular, too. However, popularity is a dangerous way to measure whether something is actually objectively better. Sometimes the most popular thing really is better. And sometimes Putin is super popular. It's complicated. :)

yyyymmddhhmmss• 7 years ago

I am pretty new to development, and I keep trying to prove myself wrong over my apprehension to willy-nilly accumulate dependencies just because “the time savings add up”.

Before starting any new project, I research and try all the existing similar projects I can find. I can predict their stability with overwhelming precision just by glancing at the dependencies, so the few projects I have built use only the most vanilla version of mainstream dependencies.

And another result of this observation has been that I have come to devalue the word of devs with that happy-go-lucky approach to dependency accumulation. It seems to correlate with the exaggerated optimism that persists around everything in the development community. I’d like to be more optimistic just like everyone else, but ignoring debt like this doesn’t seem like the right way to do it.

ddevault• 7 years ago

Is the code well-written? Read some of it. Does it look like the authors have been careful, conscientious, and consistent? Does it look like code you’d want to debug? You may need to.

This, 10,000x. I've repeated a similar mantra many, many times, and it's one of the most important reasons I refuse to use proprietary software. You should consider no software a black box, and consider the software you chose to use carefully, because it's your responsibility to keep it in good working order.

bunderbunder• 7 years ago

Making it someone else's responsibility to keep it in good working order is the value proposition behind (good) proprietary software: You give them money, they give you a support contract.

For a company with more money than development resources, or even just a company whose development resources can be more profitably focused elsewhere, this can be a quite reasonable trade to make.

vharuck• 7 years ago

If a company behind proprietary software goes belly up, there's no support. But there are always companies or even freelance devs who can be paid to support open source code.

taeric2• 7 years ago

That said, realize that a lot of what people think is important when it comes to reviewing code is iffy, at best. Consider, git.[1] Odds are extremely high that this does not fit any style of most startups. Now, you could take that as an argument against many startup stylings, but that is not necessarily my intent here.

To their credit, they have a very exhaustive coding guideline that is fairly open to breaking rules when need be.[2]

[1] https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/wt-status.c

[2] https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/CodingG...

intertextuality• 7 years ago

To be fair, have you ever had a problem with git that wasn't a pebkac error?

ummonk2• 7 years ago

That isn't an argument against proprietary software. It's an argument against software that doesn't provide its source.

rdiddly• 7 years ago

This is excellent. Not only for the subject matter but the quality of writing. I often take an article like this, distill it into my own (usually fewer) words and save it as a text file. This one I kept "distilling" only to realize, nope, nope, the way he said it was more exact/precise/correct.

et1337• 7 years ago

Worse than package dependency is platform dependency. My code runs on top of 10 million lines of Kubernetes insanity that no one really understands, including the thousands of authors who wrote it. In theory, that means at the drop of a hat I can switch to a different cloud, kubectl apply, and presto! Platform independence. In reality, every cloud is slightly different, and we now depend on and work around a lot of weird quirks of Kubernetes itself. We're stuck with what we've got.

monksy2• 7 years ago

On dependencies:

There aren't a lot of tools out there to keep you 100% up to date and to keep moving.

There is maven-dependencies that can auto upgrade, however, that's just a simple version upgrade and may have issues with non-standard versioning. Also it doesn't help with transitive dependency conflicts.

We need good tools to alert and stop transitive dependency conflicts in their tracks. Versions helps with this, but it doesn't tell you much.

What we do need: Jenkins dependency triggers for the projects. We need something that will automatically work wtih SCM and CI to create commits based on new found dependencies. If there is something that changed your tests should confirm if it works or not.

riyakhanna19833• 7 years ago

What about existing tools, such as Synk, OSSIndex?

monksy2• 7 years ago

That's good for reporting. There should be an automated approach to keep projects up to date.

jrochkind13• 7 years ago

We do this because it’s easy, because it seems to work, because everyone else is doing it too, and, most importantly, because it seems like a natural continuation of age-old established practice.

And because we literally could not be creating software with the capabilities we are at the costs it is being produced without shared open source dependencies.

I guess this is the same thing as "it's easy", but it's actually quite a different thing when you say it like this.

mberning• 7 years ago

I am reminded of this gem: https://www.mikeperham.com/2016/02/09/kill-your-dependencies...

3xblah• 7 years ago

The problem I see is not in the fact the develpers choose to rely on third party software reuse and thus create dependencies, but in how developers choose which third party software to use. If their judgment fails, the consequences for the user can be dire.

For example, Google chose to reuse the c-ares DNS library for their Chromebooks over other available DNS libraries. It is maintained by the same person who oversees the popular libcurl.

The company issued a challenge and a $100,000 bounty for anyone who could create a persistent exploit with the Chromebook running in guest mode.

As it happened, the winnning exploit relied on an off-by-one mistake in the c-ares library.

Users are not in the position to decide which (free, open-source) code is reused in a mass market corporate product. They must rely on the judgment of the developers working for the corporation.

On my personal computers, where I run a non-corporate OS, I prefer to use code from djbdns rather than c-ares for DNS queries. If someone finds an off-by-one mistake in djbdns, and this has negative consequences for me, it will be my own judgment that is to blame.

BinaryIdiot• 7 years ago

Dependencies are such a huge pain but I kinda liked the way we handled it when I did contracting work for the NSA years ago. Essentially we told them _exactly_ what dependencies we needed, including subdependencies, and we audited them the best we could and then we included them. To avoid this headache meant we were less incentivized to just pull in a module for every little thing and, instead, write our own where necessary or used modules that had less subdependencies.

I think we're ready for a new class of dependencies. Dependencies that have little to no subdependencies. Dependencies that you can more easily audit because of fewer subdependencies.

Also, we need less building of JavaScript code in npm packages. Instead, let people access the raw code so they can not only do tree shaking but they can examine the code that is running versus the code that may be in git. You can still include it and minify it with your stuff. This would also mean you could have larger libraries that do more stuff because you'd only include what you use (think how many Java libraries work except you could pull out what you need).

I don't think there is a good software / npm solution. I think we need to change the way we work with dependencies entirely.

rossdavidh• 7 years ago

I like (and basically agree with) the article, but I have to think it basically does a good job of pointing out the problem, and a bad job of suggesting a solution. The sheer number of dependencies of most commercial software now, and the ratio of backlog-to-developers, basically insures that the work required to check all your dependencies does not normally get done.

Hypothesis: it will require a massive failure, that causes the ordinary citizen (and the ordinary really, really rich citizen) to notice that something is wrong, before it changes much.

Hypothesis 2: after that happens, the first language whose dependency manager handles this problem well, will move up greatly in how widely it's used.

alkonaut• 7 years ago

For a 100 man year project we have accumulated around a dozen external dependencies and only two of them are transitive (one for zipping and one for logging).

I think that’s fairly reasonable and about what I’d expect.

So as you might have guessed it’s not a node project, but that’s my point - perhaps the idea of dependencies is manageable so long as the platform allows you to keep it reasonable. Meaning, at the very least, a good standard library.

Felz• 7 years ago

The real dependency problem is that most languages give out way too much trust by default. Any code can have any side effects.

I'd like ways to guarantee my dependencies have no side effects, like they were Haskell with no IO/unsafePerformIo, or to aggressively audit and limit those side effects. Malicious event stream package suddenly wants to use the network? No.

beardedwizard• 7 years ago

Another way to state this is: accept the state of the world and approach the problem using an existing methodology - treat code as untrusted and whitelist execution paths. SElinux and others do this, intrinsic is another product that uses the same approach for app runtime, I think this is probably the future of this problem space.

This is zero trust, and this pattern is showing up everywhere (again?).

jancsika2• 7 years ago

Modest proposal: do the opposite of everything suggested in this article. After all, if you spend all your time inspecting your dependencies, what was the point of even having them in the first place?

This will ensure that maximum time possible is spent implementing new features. Everyone on your team can pitch in to accelerate this goal. Even non-technical outsiders can give valuable feedback. At the same time, this ensures minimum time spent fiddling about in a desperate attempt to secure the system and slowing everyone else down. Besides, unless you're already a fortune 500 company, no one on your team knows how to do security at all. (And even then the number of experts on your team is probably still dangerously close to zero.)

The software you ship will obviously be less secure than if you had focused any time at all on security. However, the utility of your software will skyrocket compared to what it would have been if you had sat around worrying about security. So much that your userbase is essentially forced to use your software because nothing else exists that even has a fraction of its feature set.

Sooner or later the insecurity will catch up with you. But this is the best part-- your software has so many features it is now a dependency of nearly everything else that exists. There is no chess move left except to sit down and somehow actually secure it so that arbitrarily tall stacks of even less secure software can keep being build atop it without collapsing like a house of cards.

And it's at this point that the four or five people in the world who actually understand security step in and sandbox your software. Hey, now it's more secure than a system built by a cult of devs tirelessly inspecting every little dependency before they ship anything. Problem solved.

simonjgreen• 7 years ago

Along the same lines is Docker Hub. Blindly building your own images via dockerfiles that pull from others images should warrant serious consideration, especially given those images can be updated at any time.

m0zg• 7 years ago

Yes, that's why I package as much stuff as I can into a hermetic Bazel build, including Python modules (and yes, I build Python programs in Google PAR format using Subpar). They're all stored in my own cloud bucket, the entire transitive closure can be tracked down, and they don't change underneath me willy-nilly. For C++ cross-builds I also package toolchains in a similar fashion. You could also package a toolchain for the host if you'd like, I just don't bother. And I package test data likewise. The build isn't 100% hermetic, but I'd say about 90%. I feel pretty good about this set-up and recommend it to others. Grabbing random packages (and worse, their transitive closures) from the internet as a part of the build sounds insane to me.

rurban• 7 years ago

I wouldn't qualify zlib as trusted high-quality code. He really needs to look deeper.

iand• 7 years ago

This is probably a prelude to a deeper discussion of the module notary service that the Go project intends to run. First announced in this post from the end of last year: https://blog.golang.org/modules2019

ilaksh• 7 years ago

I'll just go ahead and take the downvotes/burial/lectures/ridicule whatever but I need to say it anyway. I've been programming for thirty years and in my opinion effective code reuse with npm is one of the greatest achievements in the history of software engineering. It's not perfect but it should be appreciated more and the issues are being overblown.

profalseidol2• 7 years ago

There's a talk from Rich Hickey about this.

LandR3• 7 years ago

Got a link?

profalseidol2• 7 years ago

I think it's this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk

HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085952

_urga• 7 years ago

"Dependency managers can often provide statistics about usage"

Using module usage statistics as a proxy for trust is not always a good idea.

For example, I confirmed with the security team of npm that they do not audit module download statistics, i.e. no detection of gaming the system through multiple downloads from a given IP.

It's quite possible for a module to have 10,000 weekly downloads, all generated by a cron curl script run by the module's author.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case for not a few modules on npm, especially to develop trust for later exploits.

bluetech• 7 years ago

I think object-capabilities are one way to have much safer code reuse. Suppose a dependency exports a class UsefulService. In current languages, such a class can do anything - access the filesystem, access the network, etc. Suppose however that the language enforces that such actions can only be done given a reference to e.g. NetworkService, RandomService, TimeService, FilesystemService (with more or less granularity). Therefore if UsefulService is declared with `constructor(RandomService, TimeService)`, I can be sure it doesn't access any files, or hijacks any data to the network - nor do any of its transitive dependencies.

The method of sandboxing using OS processes + namespaces and what not is too heavy and unusable at such granularity.

The method of per-dependency static permission manifests in some meta-language is also poor.

The method of a single IO monad is too coarse. Also using any sort of `unsafe` should not be allowed (or be its own super-capability).

Obviously there are many tricky considerations. [For example, it is anti-modular - if suddenly UsefulService does need filesystem access, it's a breaking change, since it now must take a FilesystemService. But that sounds good to me - it's the point after all.] But does any language try to do this?

romeisendcoming• 7 years ago

Article kind of mangles the relationship between software reuse (which _has_ been here for a long time) and specific language library, etc..management.

many years ago now systems administrators were tasked with providing a safe and sane environment for end user and developers by performing the exact due diligence that is described in this article. In the 'move fast and break things age' all this has been thrown to the wind and everyone decries the language manager code sprawl and breakage. Of necessity enterprises revert to 'immutability' as if it was a desirable and necessary deployment characteristic. This is an ugly time in IT.

zzo38computer• 7 years ago

Reducing the number of dependencies can avoid many of the problems, and makes it easier to examine the code, as well as less likely to cause problems (of several kinds). Many code has too much dependencies. Whether writing in JavaScript or C or something else, I will usually not use many external libraries; most commonly none at all.

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