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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • True, but that doesn’t necessarily matter if I can compromise the privileged app instead. I could replace it, modify it on disk, or really any number of things in order to get myself a hook into a privileged position.

    Just injecting code in some function call which launches malware.exe would do the trick. Ofc signature checks and the like can help here - but those aren’t a given. There’s any number of ways you can elevate yourself on a system based off of user security if your threat model is malicious processes. Linux (and windows) will stop users from accessing each other’s crap by default, but not processes.

    Or: supply chain attacks. Now your official app without any modifications is malicious.






  • As a third party, my understanding is that both the implementation and the protocol are really hard, if not next to impossible to iterate on. Modern hardware doesn’t work like how it did when X did, and X assumes a lot of things that made sense in the 90s that don’t now. Despite that, we cram a square peg into the round hole and it mostly works - and as the peg becomes a worse shape we just cram it harder. At this point no one wants to keep working on X.

    And I know your point is that it works and we don’t need too, but we do need too. New hardware needs to support X - at least the asahi guys found bugs in the X implementation that only exists on their hardware and no one who wants to fix them. Wayland and X are vastly different, because X doesn’t make sense in the modern day. It breaks things, and a lot of old assumptions aren’t true. That sucks, especially for app devs that rely on those assumptions. But keeping around X isn’t the solution - iterating on Wayland is. Adding protocols to different parts of the stack with proper permission models, moving different pieces of X to different parts of the stack, etc. are a long term viable strategy. Even if it is painful.






  • Right, but squashed commits don’t scale for large PRs. You could argue that large PRs should be avoided, but sometimes they make sense. And in the case where you do have a large PR, a commit by commit review makes a lot of sense to keep your history clean.

    Large features that are relatively isolated from the rest of the codebase make perfect sense to do in a different branch before merging it in - you don’t merge in half broken code. Squashing a large feature into one commit gets rid of any useful history that branch may have had.








  • When you make a project with git, what you’re doing is essentially making a database to control a sequence of changes (or history) that build up your codebase. You can send this database to someone else (or in other words they can clone it), and they can make their own changes on top. If they want to send you changes back, they can send you “patches” to apply on your own database (or rather, your own history).

    Note: everything here is decentralized. Everyone has the entire history, and they send history they want others to have. Now, this can be a hassle with many developers involved. You can imagine sending everyone patches, and them putting it into their own tree, and vice versa. It’s a pain for coordination. So in practice what ends up happening is we have a few (or often, one) repo that works as a source of truth. Everyone sends patches to that repo - and pulls down patches from that repo. That’s where code forges like GitHub come in. Their job is to control this source of truth repo, and essentially coordinate what patches are “officially” in the code.

    In practice, even things like the Linux kernel have sources of truth. Linus’s tree is the “true” Linux, all the maintainers have their own tree that works as the source of truth for their own version of Linux (which they send changes back to Linus when ready), and so on. Your company might have their own repo for their internal project to send to the maintainers as well.

    In practice that means everyone has a copy of the entire repo, but we designate one repo as the real one for the project at hand. This entire (somewhat convoluted mess) is just a way to decide - “where do I get my changes from”. Sending your changes to everyone doesn’t scale, so in practice we just choose who everyone coordinates with.

    Git is completely decentralized (it’s just a database - and everyone has their own copy), but project development isn’t. Code forges like GitHub just represent that.