[stephenr]

I wouldn't consider what you presented as the "normal" or "ok" way of doing things either, especially not on anything resembling a live (i.e. not development/sandbox) environment.

A distro (or official vendor, or possibly a trusted third-party) repo of pre-built, signed packages would always be my first choice.

If one of those isn't available, my next step would be to create a package for the tool in question, part of which is setting up a file for `uscan` to download new source archives, and compare against the signatures.

In this scenario we (as in the organisation) are now responsible for actually building and maintaining the package, but we can still be assured that it's built from the original sources, we can still install it on production (and even dev, staging, whatever) servers with a simple call to apt/aptitude, and dependencies, removal, upgrades, etc are still handled cleanly.

[squar1sm]

About "ok". You're right. I probably used a loaded word without context. I too use whatever default package repo, followed by "extras" or whatever is available. You described a sane and nice process. I guess my point is, at some point we are are assuming "many eyes" (the binaries might be built with the previously mentioned make;configure steps) unless you are auditing all sources which is unlikely. Especially unlikely on dev machines. Even after that it seems like there is an infinite continuum of paranoia.

I find it interesting that binary packages have existed for decades and yet `rpm etc` knowledge is rare. Why did curl sh become popular? Why doesn't every project have rpm|deb download links for every distro version? Why don't github projects have binary auto-builds hosted by github? I'd argue that it's too difficult. Binary packaging didn't succeed universally. For deployment, containers are (in the end) easier.

But the original article is conflating container concepts and user behavior (not wrongly). If docker hub does end up hosting malware-laden images, it would be interesting emergent behavior but it would be orthogonal to containers. Like toolbars. Toolbars probably aren't evil. A vector for evil maybe?

[stephenr]

> I find it interesting that binary packages have existed for decades and yet `rpm etc` knowledge is rare

What makes you think the knowledge is rare? Among developers who actively target linux distributions I would imagine the opposite is true.

Even a number of the referenced curl|bash offenders are just using that as a "shortcut" to add their own apt/yum repos and calling apt-get/yum to install their binary package(s).