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by symtos 3593 days ago
how does debian developers independently building on their machines help? if anything it adds another point of failure. if you trust upstream enough to run their code, you implicitly trust the state of their hardware anyway (since nobody has the time to completely grasp any reasonably large codebase in its entirety); so it seems sensible to trust their builds more than some random debian maintainer
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> if you trust upstream enough to run their code, you implicitly trust the state of their hardware anyway

No, these are fundamentally different levels of trust.

Note that we are talking about a breach-in into the webserver, not into a developer's private computer.

For example, some time ago there was a breach-in into the Linux Kernel website. It had almost no effect on the security of this project, because so many people had the sources, and because the Git commits are signed by the authors.

So not only were the attackers unable to distribute their binaries. They were also unable to place malicious commits into the source code. And this was mainly because every distro builds their Linux kernel on their own (and also because sources are signed by the developers and reviewed by multiple developers, although that's not the point of discussion here).

The breach-in into the Bitcoin webserver could have been similarily effect-less, if they were as well-organized as the Linux kernel and worked better together with the distros.