[Distutils] PEP470 installation security problems

holger krekel holger at merlinux.eu
Wed Oct 8 12:33:00 CEST 2014


On Wed, Oct 08, 2014 at 06:24 -0400, Donald Stufft wrote:
> > On Oct 8, 2014, at 6:06 AM, holger krekel <holger at merlinux.eu> wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, Oct 08, 2014 at 05:44 -0400, Donald Stufft wrote:
> >> 
> >> I think raising the issue is FUDish because it has nothing to do with using
> >> multi repository support for things that are registered on PyPI. 
> > 
> > Well, the PEP has two central paragraphs motivating multi-index operations:
> > 
> >    The two common installer tools, pip and easy_install/setuptools, both
> >    support the concept of additional locations to search for files to
> >    satisify the installation requirements and have done so for many years.
> >    This means that there is no need to "phase" in a new flag or concept and
> >    the solution to installing a project from a repository other than PyPI
> >    will function regardless of how old (within reason) the end user's
> >    installer is. Not only has this concept existed in the Python tooling
> >    for some time, but it is a concept that exists across languages and even
> >    extending to the OS level with OS package tools almost universally using
> >    multiple repository support making it extremely likely that someone is
> >    already familar with the concept.
> > 
> >    Additionally, the multiple repository approach is a concept that is
> >    useful outside of the narrow scope of allowing projects which wish
> >    to be included on the index portion of PyPI but do not wish to
> >    utilize the repository portion of PyPI. This includes places where a
> >    company may wish to host a repository that contains their internal
> >    packages or where a project may wish to have multiple "channels" of
> >    releases, such as alpha, beta, release candidate, and final release.
> > 
> > and then it concretely suggests "--extra-index-url" and gives an example.
> > It does not say that this is only good if you are using private projects
> > that have a presence on PyPI.  It rather suggests multi-index is the thing 
> > to go for today, generally, does it not?
> > 
> > Given that PyPI is a wiki and Linux Distros are a curated index, i
> > insist it's dangerous to recommend to mix multiple indexes with pip if
> > you don't know quite exactly what you are doing.  Do you really disagree
> > on this?
> 
> It is not dangerous to mix multiple indexes in the case that PEP 470 is
> specifying, which is when you want to have files for a project listed on the
> PyPI index hosted on a different repository.

Yes, that case is not more dangerous than today.

> The use of --extra-index-url in
> PEP 470 is to show how someone would add one of the extra repositories for a
> project that is indexed on PyPI, which is again roughly as safe as installing
> from PyPI at all.

Then we are reading the sections i cite above very differently -- IMO
you and the PEP generally push for multi-index ops without explaining 
the risks.

Maybe someone else can chime in.

best,
holger

> If you use the multiple repository support to install things which are not
> claimed on PyPI and you do not disable the PyPI index, then yes that is
> dangerous. It also has nothing to do with whether it's safe for someone to
> add an additional repository that points to the repository that PIL is located
> at.
> 
> I've also never suggested to anyone that their company should rely on PyPI
> and instead I point them towards either making their own repository with
> Apache/Index/Twisted Web or using devpi. My goal is to make PyPI as safe as
> possible for people who don't do that, but there are limits to what is possible.
> 
> ---
> Donald Stufft
> PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
> 


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