> Fundamental in the dependency cooldown plan is the hope that other people - those who weren't smart enough to configure a cooldown - serve as unpaid, inadvertent beta testers for newly released packages.
This is wrong to an extent.
This plan works by letting software supply chain companies find security issues in new releases. Many security companies have automated scanners for popular and less popular libraries, with manual triggers for those libraries which are not in the top N.
Their incentive is to be the first to publish a blog post about a cool new attack that they discovered and that their solution can prevent.
Sure, but the alternative the author proposes not only allows for time for those scanners to run but explicitly models that time as a formal part of the release process.
Status quo (at least in most language's package managers) + cooldowns basically means that running those checks happens in parallel with the new version becoming the implicit default version shipped to the public. Isn't it better to run the safety and security checks before making it the default?
Agreed that the upload queue solves this problem, but, one thing about the current system is it lets people choose where on the continuum they want to be depending on their risk/reward profile.
FTA, "even make the queued releases available for intentional, explicitly volunteering beta testers to try out." Under the proposed system, you have to opt in to the insecure early releases. Rather than opting out of them. Which seems like a more secure default!
There's no free lunch here. Delays in publishing not only slow down attacks, they also slow down critical security patches. There's no one-size-fits-all policy here, you're at risk either way.
I would suggest the current system fails to efficiently choose (as you have to align multiple pathways, like updates, "manual" installs, adding new packages), and so effectively there's only the illusion of choice. Switching instead to a queue not only means that there's time for QA/security scans, but it's much easier to make the choice to speed up than slow down.
>Sure, but the alternative the author proposes not only allows for time for those scanners to run but explicitly models that time as a formal part of the release process.
This is true but that doesn't make "Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider", the title of the article and the subject of the first part, true.
Or: make the client side automatically pick the previous version if the latest is too new.
That's a lot less work than putting an extra validation step into the publishing pipeline. And with sane defaults it lets the user make an informed decision when special circumstances arise.
And it doesn't have to be separate companies. You can have cooldowns on most machines but reserve a few with no cooldowns that run vulnerability scanners & act like honeypots. Check for new activity after updates of the honeypot machines, e.g. connections to new domains, and flag what updated for review.
I feel like this is false. These companies mostly seem to monitor social media and security mailing lists with an army of LLMs and then republish someone else's free labor as an LLM slop summary as fast as possible whilst using dodgy SEO practices to get picked up quickly.
They do do original work sometimes. But most of it feels like reposted stuff from the open source community or even other vendors
"This plan works by letting software supply chain companies find security issues in new releases."
If it was that easy we'd simply find all vulnerabilities before the release. If the supply chain companies can run the scanners you can (and should) run them too. Even if we assume there is more to it, it would make sense to let those companies do the work before GA.
But it is not that easy. The true value comes from many eye balls and then we are back at cooldowns being some eye balls grifting others.
Okay sure, but what happens when a high CVE is discovered that requires immediate patching – does that get around the Upload Queue? If so, it's possible one could opportunistically co-author the patch and shuttle in a vulnerability, circumventing the Upload Queue.
If you instead decide that the Upload Queue can't be circumvented, now you're increasing the duration a patch for a CVE is visible. Even if the CVE disclosure is not made public, the patch sitting in the Upload Queue makes it far more discoverable.
Best as I can tell, neither one of these fairly obvious issues are covered in this blog post, but they clearly need to be addressed for Upload Queues to be a good alternative.
--
Separately, at least with NPM, you can define a cooldown in your global .npmrc, so the argument that cooldowns need to be implemented per project is, for at least one (very) common package manger, patently untrue.
# Wait 7 days before installing
> npm config set min-release-age 7
This doesn’t solve the problem either, which is that of the Confused Deputy [1]. An arbitrary piece of code I’m downloading shouldn’t be able to run as Ryan by default with access to everything Ryan has.
We need to revitalize research into capabilities-based security on consumer OSs, which AFAIK is the only thing that solves this problem. (Web browsers - literally user “agents” - solve this problem with capabilities too: webapps get explicit access to resources, no ambient authority to files, etc.)
Solving this problem will only become more pressing as we have more agents acting on our behalf.
The people who will benefit from a cooldown weren’t reviewing updates anyway. Without the cooldown they would just be one more malware victim. If you don’t review code before you update, it just makes sense to wait until others have. Despite what the article says, the only people who benefit from a rush to update are the malware spreaders.
Having skimmed the article I understand the title. While I agree on some level I wholly disagree on another: to me "dependency cooldown" is a way to automate something as old as time: the late-adopter-laggard. Although I am a tech-nerd and like the latest stuff. I have almost always let other people try it out first. I've missed out on some things because of it but if you are more conservative in your actions it just happens naturally. I think it is OK to have a dependency cooldown, in fact not everybody should update to the newest stuff right away. It's good to have cascaded updates. See the crowd-strike incident in 2024. If some people want to be later in the chain so be it. They will also miss out on important security updates by their cooldown time. I'd advocate for the feature despite never having used it. So "collectively rational" in my mind.
The core point is of course solid. By not updating on day 0, maybe somebody else spend the effort to discover this and you didn't. But there are plenty of other benefits for not rolling with the newest and greatest versions enabled.
I'd argue for intentional dependency updates. It just so happens that it's identified in one sprint and planned for the next one, giving the team a delay.
First of all, sometimes you can reject the dependency update. Maybe there is no benefit in updating. Maybe there are no important security fixes brought by an update. Maybe it breaks the app in one way or another (and yes, even minor versions do that).
After you know why you want to update the dependency, you can start testing. In an ideal world, somebody would look at the diff before applying this to production. I know how this works in the real world, don't worry. But you have the option of catching this. If you automatically update to newest you don't have this option.
And again, all these rituals give you time - maybe someone will identify attacks faster. If you perform these rituals, maybe that someone will be you. Of course, it is better for the business to skip this effort because it saves time and money.
Then I sincerely hope my bank and doctor and government offices are all free-riders.
Dependency cooldowns, like staged update rollouts, mean less brittleness / more robustness in that not every part of society is hit at once. And the fact that cooldowns are not evenly distributed is a good thing. Early adopters and vibe coders take more chances, banks should take less.
But yeah, upload queues also make sense. We should have both!
A central package cooldown is not really any different to individual cooldowns.
The main reason for the cooldown is so security companies can find the issues, not that unwitting victims will find them.
One problem of the central cooldown is that it restricts the choice to be able to consume a package immediately, and some people might think that a problem.
Dependency cooldowns are how you can improve your security on an individual level. Using them does not make you a free rider any more than using Debian instead of Ubuntu instead of Arch does. Different people/companies/machines have different levels of acceptable risk - cooldowns let you tune that to your use case. Using open source software does not come with a contract or responsibility for free, implicit pentesting.
Upload queues are how a package manager/registry can collectively improve security for it's users. I cannot implement an upload queue for just me - the value comes from it being done in a centralized way.
I'm in favor of both, though hopefully with upload queues the broader practice of long dependency cooldowns would become more limited to security-focused applications.
Mature professionals and organizations have always waited to install updated dependencies in production, with exceptions for severe security issues such as zero day attacks.
"Free riding" is not the right term here. It's more a case of being the angels in the saying "fools rush in where angels fear to tread".
If the industry as a whole were mature (in the sense of responsibility, not age), upgrades would be tested in offline environments and rolled out once they pass that process.
Of course, not everyone has the resources for that, so there's always going to be some "free riding" in that sense.
That dilutes the term, though. Different organizations have different tolerance for risk, different requirements for running the latest stuff, different resources. There's always going to be asymmetry there. This isn't free riding.
I think what you actually want is audit sharing as the cooldown period. No audit shared with the community yet? The package is still in cooldown. Or you can risk it and run unaudited dependencies or audit it yourself and potentially share that.
It seems to me that many organizations are relying on other companies to do their auditing in any case, why not just admit that and explicitly rely on that? Choose who you trust, accept their audits. Organizations can perform or even outsource their own auditing and publish that.
I don't think this is wrong, but I don't think it will be a problem in practice. One alternative to cooldowns is commercial repackagers, like Chainguard. As long as there are commercial clients who want a validated source of packages, there'll be a market for providing a security wrapper around private package repositories. It's in their interests to a) be quick to get new package versions through, and b) share any fixes they make or any problems they find with the upstream, because it's always going to be cheaper to do that than maintain a long tail of proprietary security patches (not to mention the risk of the clients complaining about either licence problems or drift from the original projects).
That means there's an incentivised slot in the ecosystem for a group of package consumers who are motivated to find security problems quickly. It's not all on the wider development community.
One of the biggest issues I see with Upload Queues here that is not talked about is the added complexity on the package managers themselves (PyPI, NPM, crates.io ...).
They are already complex beasts of software, extremely important for the ecosystems, and not always well funded. Adding all this extra complexity, with official bypasses (for security reasons), monitoring APIs (for security review while a new version is in the queue), and others is not cheap.
And if somehow, they get the funding to do this, will they also get the funding for the maintenance in the long term?
I don't think the benefits here (which is only explicitly model the cooldown) are enough to offset the downsides.
Would staying at an LTS version instead of running my production workloads on the bleeding edge also be free-riding, because I am depriving the community of my testing?
One thing I don't understand about cooldowns is that it seems that if everybody uses cooldowns then there is no effective cooldown. Then you ll have to keep increase the cooldown period to get the advanatage...
While an upload queue does sound like a better solution overall, the suggestion of cooldowns as immoral is absurd.
Ever decided to not buy some new technology or video game or product right away and to wait and see if it’s worth it? You’re an immoral freeloader benefiting from the suffering of others who bought it right away.
Anyone in the IT Ops side of things knows the adage that you don't run ".0" software. You wait for a while to let the kinks get worked out by those who can afford the risk of downtime, and of the vendors to find and work out bugs in new software on their own.
Are conservative, uptime-oriented organizations "free-riders" for waiting to install new software on critical systems? Is that a sin, as this implies?
The answer is no. It's certainly a quandry - someone has to run it first. But a little time to let it bake in labs and low-risk environments is worth it.
That can sometimes be true, but the reverse is also problematic: Uniform automatic updates can turn some users who were happy with the status-quo into unwitting guinea pigs for unexpected features and changes, without informed consent.
All else being equal, I'd rather the people who desire the new features be the earlier-adopters, because they're more likely to be the ones pushing for changes and because they're more likely to be watching what happens.
You can do this everywhere. Not just libraries. I take great pleasure in using the old 2022 LTS builds of Unity. The stability of these products is incredible compared to the latest versions. I simply have to ignore console errors in unity 6. In 2022 they are much more meaningful.
Think about how much cumulative human suffering must be experienced to bring you stable and effective products like this. Why hit the reset button right when things start getting good every time?
It’s hard to piece together what the actual proposal is around all of the hyperbole, strawmanned arguments, and emotional language. It more or less claims Upload Queues solve all of the problems without explaining any of the how… Then it suddenly shifts to “executing markdown” because LLMs?
Is the idea I’d point my security scanner at preview.registry.npmjs.org/ and npmjs.org would wait 7 days before the package would publish on the main registry?
This is as useless as the circular view that releasing dependencies for others to test makes you a free-rider on them using your stuff.
Which, honestly, I think it is fair to say that a lot of supply chains are lulling people into a false sense of what they do. Your supply chain for groceries puts a lot of effort into making itself safe. Your supply chain for software dependencies is run more like a playground.
This is not true. Attackers are usually not publishing packages under their own accounts. They are publishing packages using hacked accounts of major packages that have many dependants.
The real owner will (hopefully) notice when a malicious version is published.
If you use a cooldown then it gives the real owner of the account enough time to report the hack and get the malicious version taken down.
I don't think queues like this are a panacea but they are a good idea. They buy time. That's the whole point. Time to respond. Time for a paper trail. Time to investigate. Time to cancel.
Have a normal path, eg days, a week or more (a month!). Have a selection of fast paths. Much shorter time. Days or even hours. Exceptions require higher trust. Indicators like money / reputation / history could be useful signals even if its only part of a paper trail. Treat exceptions as acceptable but requiring good reasons and explanation. This means a CVE fix from someone with high reputation could go through faster. While exceptions don't reduce the need for scrutiny they do enable clarity about the alternative chosen. Mainly because someone had to justify it away from the normal path. That's valuable in itself.
There's no perfection here. Credit cards and credentials get stolen. Reputation drifts since people change for all kinds of reasons.
Queues buy time. Time to find out. Time to back out.
The moral judgement of a practice not unknown to those who handle production deployment (takes me back to the days where i had to use a local maven repository with dated dependencies) is on a very shaky foundation.
We used to focus more on finding issues before a new release, and while it remains common to find bugs in older ones, not having enough users should not be used as a crutch for testing.
> (dependency cooldowns) don't address the core issue: publishing and distribution are different things and it's not clear why they have to be coupled together.
Besides some edge cases for a large project, the core issue remains code quality and maintainability practices. The rush to push several patches per day is insane to me, especially in current AI ecosystem.
Breaking changes used to have enough transitionary period, see Python 2 to 3, while today it is done on a whim, even by SaaS folks who should provide better DX for their customers. Regardless, open-source/source-available projects now expect more from their users, and I wonder how much of it remains reasonable.
One thing people miss is that bugs in open source are much much easier to fix when you catch them right away. You find more bugs when you test aggressively, but the effort per bug is usually significantly lower.
I think the key is to differentiate testing from deployment: you don't need to run bleeding edge everywhere to find bugs and contribute. Even running nightly releases on one production instance will surface real problems.
- One idea is for projects not to update each dep just X hours after release, but on their own cycles, every N weeks or such. Someone still gets bit first, of course, but not everyone at once, and for those doing it, any upgrade-related testing or other work also ends up conveniently batched.
- Developers legitimately vary in how much they value getting the newest and greatest vs. minimizing risk. Similar logic to some people taking beta versions of software. A brand new or hobby project might take the latest version of something; a big project might upgrade occasionally and apply a strict cooldown. For users' sake, there is value in any projects that get bit not being the widely-used ones!
- Time (independent of usage) does catch some problems. A developer realizes they were phished and reports, for example, or the issue is caught by someone looking at a repo or commit stream.
As I lamented in the other post, it's unfortunate that merely using an upgraded package for a test run often exposes a bunch of a project's keys and so on. There are more angles to attack this from than solely when to upgrade packages.
Free-riding is frequently a good strategy. If you don't want other people free-riding on you, sign contracts saying they can't. That means, for instance, don't use MIT license.
Curious what happens in the context of a security flaw becoming known with a queue, especially with the whole dependency tree in play. Do we now wait for the fix to come through the queue? Or it gets an exception? Do packages that embed the flawed library have to wait for the fix to merge (through whatever path) before they can depend on it? Or does the exception cascade out to the entire ecosystem that depends on the flawed package?
This wouldn't stop a lot of supply chain attacks. Attacks aren't identified immediately. Often they are only identified months later. And in that period, plenty of zero days are fixed. So this technique not only doesn't fix the problem, it introduces others. Also, again, this only happens to Python because of design flaws in the package managers themselves. Fix the package managers and this all goes away.
If everyone simultaneously imposes the same cooldown period for picking up a new dependency, that's as good as nothing at all. The malicious change just sits there for 20 days (or whatever) with nobody looking at it or running it. Then it hits everywhere at once.
However, a randomized cooldown may be a good idea. To borrow a pandemic term, it flattens the curve.
It's weird, because I'm not aware of any OSS licenses or authors who say "you are expected to upgrade to the most recent release of this package as soon as it comes out so that you'll get infected with any malware it might contain."
Good thing the internet is here to lecture me about all the secret obligations I have incurred by creating and using open source software!
Or you could just, like, not update things immediately just because you can. It's wild that we now refer to it as a "cooldown" to not immediately update something. The sane way would be each user upgrades when they feel they need to, and then updates would naturally be staggered. The security risks of vulnerabilities are magnified by everyone rushing to upgrade constantly.
They are also collectively rational, as a response to an ecosystem that's spun out of control and habitually consumes rats nests of dependencies.
Early participation and beta programs are outsourcing careful engineering via making everybody else guinea pigs. If we want to sling around accusations of free-riding (really?!), you're slacking on testing and free-riding on your early users.
I agree a hundred percent with the authors. We have worked hard to get us where we are today where there is pressure for companies to update their packages. This so called cool down backslides us from it.
2.0.6 was released less than a day ago. How long will you wait? I'd argue any wait is unwarranted.
It sounds nice to people because we are used to thinking in terms of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL Server releases where people wait for months after a new version is released to update. Except companies actually pay for these! So somehow this kind of illogical action or I would argue learned helplessness that happens with flagship Microsoft product releases is what we are now advocating as the default everywhere which is a terrible idea.
Dependency cooldowns should NOT be the default. I don't know what a proper solution is but I know this isn't it.
Yes the publish-distribute delay pattern looks like a reasonable design.
But you’re not a “free-rider” if you intentionally let others leap before you. You’re just being cautious, which is rational behavior and should be baked into assumptions about how any ecosystem actually works.
Dependency cooldowns are theater. They will do nothing. Supply chain hacks get caught when someone gets pwned, and all this does is push the deadline out.
You find attacks via cross-organization auditing, like you do in Linux distros, and this doesn't do that.
Tangential, should server processes be defined with a whitelist of outbound hosts? Deno does that in-process. Don't see much incentive if a malware cant contact its mothership.
If lawmakers understood even an iota of technology they'd be trying to legislate using your ID card to upload npm dependencies with more than 10k downloads instead of for watching porn.
122 comments
> Fundamental in the dependency cooldown plan is the hope that other people - those who weren't smart enough to configure a cooldown - serve as unpaid, inadvertent beta testers for newly released packages.
This is wrong to an extent.
This plan works by letting software supply chain companies find security issues in new releases. Many security companies have automated scanners for popular and less popular libraries, with manual triggers for those libraries which are not in the top N.
Their incentive is to be the first to publish a blog post about a cool new attack that they discovered and that their solution can prevent.
Status quo (at least in most language's package managers) + cooldowns basically means that running those checks happens in parallel with the new version becoming the implicit default version shipped to the public. Isn't it better to run the safety and security checks before making it the default?
This is the wrong framing.
There's no free lunch here. Delays in publishing not only slow down attacks, they also slow down critical security patches. There's no one-size-fits-all policy here, you're at risk either way.
>Sure, but the alternative the author proposes not only allows for time for those scanners to run but explicitly models that time as a formal part of the release process.
This is true but that doesn't make "Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider", the title of the article and the subject of the first part, true.
That's a lot less work than putting an extra validation step into the publishing pipeline. And with sane defaults it lets the user make an informed decision when special circumstances arise.
They do do original work sometimes. But most of it feels like reposted stuff from the open source community or even other vendors
If it was that easy we'd simply find all vulnerabilities before the release. If the supply chain companies can run the scanners you can (and should) run them too. Even if we assume there is more to it, it would make sense to let those companies do the work before GA.
But it is not that easy. The true value comes from many eye balls and then we are back at cooldowns being some eye balls grifting others.
If you instead decide that the Upload Queue can't be circumvented, now you're increasing the duration a patch for a CVE is visible. Even if the CVE disclosure is not made public, the patch sitting in the Upload Queue makes it far more discoverable.
Best as I can tell, neither one of these fairly obvious issues are covered in this blog post, but they clearly need to be addressed for Upload Queues to be a good alternative.
--
Separately, at least with NPM, you can define a cooldown in your global .npmrc, so the argument that cooldowns need to be implemented per project is, for at least one (very) common package manger, patently untrue.
# Wait 7 days before installing > npm config set min-release-age 7
We need to revitalize research into capabilities-based security on consumer OSs, which AFAIK is the only thing that solves this problem. (Web browsers - literally user “agents” - solve this problem with capabilities too: webapps get explicit access to resources, no ambient authority to files, etc.)
Solving this problem will only become more pressing as we have more agents acting on our behalf.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem
Servants! Just do your open source magic, We're impatient! Ah and thanks for all the code, our hungry hungry LLMs were starving.
I'd argue for intentional dependency updates. It just so happens that it's identified in one sprint and planned for the next one, giving the team a delay.
First of all, sometimes you can reject the dependency update. Maybe there is no benefit in updating. Maybe there are no important security fixes brought by an update. Maybe it breaks the app in one way or another (and yes, even minor versions do that).
After you know why you want to update the dependency, you can start testing. In an ideal world, somebody would look at the diff before applying this to production. I know how this works in the real world, don't worry. But you have the option of catching this. If you automatically update to newest you don't have this option.
And again, all these rituals give you time - maybe someone will identify attacks faster. If you perform these rituals, maybe that someone will be you. Of course, it is better for the business to skip this effort because it saves time and money.
Dependency cooldowns, like staged update rollouts, mean less brittleness / more robustness in that not every part of society is hit at once. And the fact that cooldowns are not evenly distributed is a good thing. Early adopters and vibe coders take more chances, banks should take less.
But yeah, upload queues also make sense. We should have both!
The main reason for the cooldown is so security companies can find the issues, not that unwitting victims will find them.
One problem of the central cooldown is that it restricts the choice to be able to consume a package immediately, and some people might think that a problem.
Dependency cooldowns are how you can improve your security on an individual level. Using them does not make you a free rider any more than using Debian instead of Ubuntu instead of Arch does. Different people/companies/machines have different levels of acceptable risk - cooldowns let you tune that to your use case. Using open source software does not come with a contract or responsibility for free, implicit pentesting.
Upload queues are how a package manager/registry can collectively improve security for it's users. I cannot implement an upload queue for just me - the value comes from it being done in a centralized way.
I'm in favor of both, though hopefully with upload queues the broader practice of long dependency cooldowns would become more limited to security-focused applications.
"Free riding" is not the right term here. It's more a case of being the angels in the saying "fools rush in where angels fear to tread".
If the industry as a whole were mature (in the sense of responsibility, not age), upgrades would be tested in offline environments and rolled out once they pass that process.
Of course, not everyone has the resources for that, so there's always going to be some "free riding" in that sense.
That dilutes the term, though. Different organizations have different tolerance for risk, different requirements for running the latest stuff, different resources. There's always going to be asymmetry there. This isn't free riding.
It seems to me that many organizations are relying on other companies to do their auditing in any case, why not just admit that and explicitly rely on that? Choose who you trust, accept their audits. Organizations can perform or even outsource their own auditing and publish that.
https://mozilla.github.io/cargo-vet/
That means there's an incentivised slot in the ecosystem for a group of package consumers who are motivated to find security problems quickly. It's not all on the wider development community.
> Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider
Avg tech company: "that's perfect, we love to be free riders."
They are already complex beasts of software, extremely important for the ecosystems, and not always well funded. Adding all this extra complexity, with official bypasses (for security reasons), monitoring APIs (for security review while a new version is in the queue), and others is not cheap.
And if somehow, they get the funding to do this, will they also get the funding for the maintenance in the long term?
I don't think the benefits here (which is only explicitly model the cooldown) are enough to offset the downsides.
If you're not doing the work yourself, it makes sense to give the people who review and test their dependencies some time to do their work.
Ever decided to not buy some new technology or video game or product right away and to wait and see if it’s worth it? You’re an immoral freeloader benefiting from the suffering of others who bought it right away.
Anyone in the IT Ops side of things knows the adage that you don't run ".0" software. You wait for a while to let the kinks get worked out by those who can afford the risk of downtime, and of the vendors to find and work out bugs in new software on their own.
Are conservative, uptime-oriented organizations "free-riders" for waiting to install new software on critical systems? Is that a sin, as this implies?
The answer is no. It's certainly a quandry - someone has to run it first. But a little time to let it bake in labs and low-risk environments is worth it.
All else being equal, I'd rather the people who desire the new features be the earlier-adopters, because they're more likely to be the ones pushing for changes and because they're more likely to be watching what happens.
Think about how much cumulative human suffering must be experienced to bring you stable and effective products like this. Why hit the reset button right when things start getting good every time?
Is the idea I’d point my security scanner at preview.registry.npmjs.org/ and npmjs.org would wait 7 days before the package would publish on the main registry?
Which, honestly, I think it is fair to say that a lot of supply chains are lulling people into a false sense of what they do. Your supply chain for groceries puts a lot of effort into making itself safe. Your supply chain for software dependencies is run more like a playground.
The real owner will (hopefully) notice when a malicious version is published.
If you use a cooldown then it gives the real owner of the account enough time to report the hack and get the malicious version taken down.
Have a normal path, eg days, a week or more (a month!). Have a selection of fast paths. Much shorter time. Days or even hours. Exceptions require higher trust. Indicators like money / reputation / history could be useful signals even if its only part of a paper trail. Treat exceptions as acceptable but requiring good reasons and explanation. This means a CVE fix from someone with high reputation could go through faster. While exceptions don't reduce the need for scrutiny they do enable clarity about the alternative chosen. Mainly because someone had to justify it away from the normal path. That's valuable in itself.
There's no perfection here. Credit cards and credentials get stolen. Reputation drifts since people change for all kinds of reasons.
Queues buy time. Time to find out. Time to back out.
But as others have noted, people having different cooldown settings means a nice staggered rollout.
We used to focus more on finding issues before a new release, and while it remains common to find bugs in older ones, not having enough users should not be used as a crutch for testing.
> (dependency cooldowns) don't address the core issue: publishing and distribution are different things and it's not clear why they have to be coupled together.
Besides some edge cases for a large project, the core issue remains code quality and maintainability practices. The rush to push several patches per day is insane to me, especially in current AI ecosystem.
Breaking changes used to have enough transitionary period, see Python 2 to 3, while today it is done on a whim, even by SaaS folks who should provide better DX for their customers. Regardless, open-source/source-available projects now expect more from their users, and I wonder how much of it remains reasonable.
I think the key is to differentiate testing from deployment: you don't need to run bleeding edge everywhere to find bugs and contribute. Even running nightly releases on one production instance will surface real problems.
idk if one of the touted benefits is really real - you need to be able to jump changes to the front of the queue and get them out asap sometimes.
hacked credentials will definitely be using that path. it gives you another risk signal sure, but the power sticks around
- One idea is for projects not to update each dep just X hours after release, but on their own cycles, every N weeks or such. Someone still gets bit first, of course, but not everyone at once, and for those doing it, any upgrade-related testing or other work also ends up conveniently batched.
- Developers legitimately vary in how much they value getting the newest and greatest vs. minimizing risk. Similar logic to some people taking beta versions of software. A brand new or hobby project might take the latest version of something; a big project might upgrade occasionally and apply a strict cooldown. For users' sake, there is value in any projects that get bit not being the widely-used ones!
- Time (independent of usage) does catch some problems. A developer realizes they were phished and reports, for example, or the issue is caught by someone looking at a repo or commit stream.
As I lamented in the other post, it's unfortunate that merely using an upgraded package for a test run often exposes a bunch of a project's keys and so on. There are more angles to attack this from than solely when to upgrade packages.
Upload queues are better than cooldowns
I almost didn't read it because I wasn't interested in a rant. This is a genuinely good idea though so I'm glad I did.
Alas, I did click through so perhaps the title is more effective than my sentiments.
However, a randomized cooldown may be a good idea. To borrow a pandemic term, it flattens the curve.
Good thing the internet is here to lecture me about all the secret obligations I have incurred by creating and using open source software!
Early participation and beta programs are outsourcing careful engineering via making everybody else guinea pigs. If we want to sling around accusations of free-riding (really?!), you're slacking on testing and free-riding on your early users.
Here is one example
https://www.nuget.org/packages/System.CommandLine#versions-b...
2.0.6 was released less than a day ago. How long will you wait? I'd argue any wait is unwarranted.
It sounds nice to people because we are used to thinking in terms of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL Server releases where people wait for months after a new version is released to update. Except companies actually pay for these! So somehow this kind of illogical action or I would argue learned helplessness that happens with flagship Microsoft product releases is what we are now advocating as the default everywhere which is a terrible idea.
Dependency cooldowns should NOT be the default. I don't know what a proper solution is but I know this isn't it.
But you’re not a “free-rider” if you intentionally let others leap before you. You’re just being cautious, which is rational behavior and should be baked into assumptions about how any ecosystem actually works.
You find attacks via cross-organization auditing, like you do in Linux distros, and this doesn't do that.
> they place substantial costs onto everyone else
Me choosing to NOT download something places NO burden on anyone else. There is no logic by which you'll convince me otherwise.
But alas.