On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 23:57 +0000, Benji Weber wrote:
On 31/10/2007, Aniruddha mailing_list@orange.nl wrote:
In Gentoo/FreeBSD/Debian/Ubuntu/ you don't have to worry about that since the maintainer of that package checks this for you.
You are trusting the Gentoo/FreeBSD/Debian/Ubuntu packager to do the checks contientiously, and not insert anything malicious h(im|er)self.
Apparently in openSuSE there is no such safety precaution.
You have to trust the packager just the same. There are additional third party repositories for the other distributions too & you have to decide whether to trust those. SOme might argue that the core packages that make up the openSUSE distribution be trusted more as it is the base for SLE which has to have rigorous checks. But at the end of the day it depends who you trust.
For Gentoo/FreeBSD/Debian/Ubuntu/ there aren't additional repositories necessary since these distributions maintain 14000-22000 packages themselves. openSUSE on the other hand forces you to use 3r party repositories to get basic functionality working (see http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_Formats/10.3 ).
And you don't have to trust the packager, you trust the distribution and it's security policy. And don't forget packages passes many hands before ending up in the stable tree. In Debian/Ubuntu it goes from Experimental to Unstable to Testing to Stable. I can assure that when it arrives at Stable you can trust it for 100%. Gentoo/FreeBSD is the same, they have a very, very long testing period for new packages finally arrive in the stable tree.
Compare this to the openSUSE buildservice where everyone can get an account start a repo and wreck havoc because there aren't any safety precautions.
Since everything in the build service is free software you can always check the source the packages are built from yourself if you wish, and so can anyone else, which provides as much as a safeguard as possible.
This can be doen for a few packages that you manually compile, however openSUSE relies so heavily on the buildservice for functionality that it becomes a daunting task to check all these packages yourself.