[timschmidt]

Most build systems are turing-complete. Rust, at least, drastically reduces the need for custom build scripts (most of my projects have empty build.rs files or lack one entirely), and build.rs being in the same language as the rest of the codebase aids transparency immensely.

[bonzini]

That doesn't make build.rs any less of a juicy target for a supply chain attack.

Arbitrary code downloaded from the internet and run at build time? That's a nightmare scenario for auditing, much worse than anything Autotools or CMake can offer.

[timschmidt]

You're not wrong about arbitrary code execution. It's just that your statement applies to most of the packages on any linux distribution, Autotools and Cmake included, regardless of language. Many moreso than Rust due to the aforementioned features of Cargo and build.rs not requiring me to be an expert in a second language just to audit it.

[bonzini]

Packages in a Linux distro are not built on my machine, they are built by the distro in a sandbox. Every time I type "cargo build" I am potentially running arbitrary code downloaded from the internet. Every time I type "make" in an Autotools program only my code runs.

> not requiring me to be an expert in another language just to audit it.

Do you do that every time your Cargo.lock changes?

[timschmidt]

> Every time I type "make" in an Autotools program only my code runs.

Says who? Make is just as good at calling arbitrary code as Cargo. Including code that reaches out over the network. Have you audited every single makefile to ensure that isn't the case?

[bonzini]

I am talking about my makefiles. They don't automatically build dependencies that I have no control on.

Whereas building my crate can run code locally that no one has ever audited.

[timschmidt]

So... you're complaining about what could happen in a Rust build if you include a library without examining that library first? How do you think that is different from doing the same in any other language?

[fragmede]

seems trivial for a configure script to call curl/wget somewhere in the depths of it, no?

[timschmidt]

Exactly. And at least Cargo will refuse to download a crate which has been yanked. So any crate which has been discovered to be compromised can be yanked, preventing further damage even when someone has already downloaded something which depends on it.

Building packages with up-to-date dependencies is also vastly preferable to building against ancient copies of libraries vendored into a codebase at some point in the past, a situation I see far too often in C/C++ codebases.

[Hackbraten]

Debian’s rules files often deliberately sinkhole the entire network during the build. It’s not the worst idea.

[fragmede]

I wonder if you could do it inside the config script without the network.