[Distutils] a plea for backward-compatibility / smooth transitions

[Donald Stufft]

On Jul 29, 2013, at 1:18 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

>  But even I am getting a little frustrated by the constant claims that "what we have now is insecure and broken, and must be fixed ASAP". The reality is that everything's more or less OK - there's a risk, certainly, and it could be severe, but many, many people are routinely using PyPI all the time without issues. And telling them that they are wrong to do so, or that they are being extremely naive over security, isn't helping.


This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how security issues present themselves. Of course things just work for people because security issues are not like regular bugs. They don't negatively affect you until someone attempts to use them to attack you. Keep your front door unlocked on your house and your valuables will remain inside _until_ someone decides to try and rob you. If you wait until people are affected by a security vulnerability then the horse has already fled the pasture and you're just attempting to close the gate after the fact.

I'm pushing hard on doing what we can to secure the infrastructure because this shit matters. Everything is more or less OK, only because no one has decided that people installing from PyPI are not a valuable enough target to go after. Prior to this push that was basically the only thing prevent someone from attacking people, that they had never decided to bother too. We are better, it's somewhat harder now, but in many areas that's still the only thing keeping people safe.

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Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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