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Packages in the official Debian archives are generally well behaved. Unofficial packages, sometimes less so. There was an incident a couple of months ago where
by scbrg 8y ago
Packages in the official Debian archives are generally well behaved. Unofficial packages, sometimes less so. There was an incident a couple of months ago where a package (from Microsoft, incidentally) replaced your /bin/sh with bash. Wouldn't it be neat if such an atrocity wasn't possible?
- isostatic 8y agoBut you'd spot that when you look at the package before you install it.
- rlpb 8y ago"Unofficial packages" aren't really in the set of supported dpkg use cases. They're a hack that fail in the general case because there are various things they can't express because the expression of them comes from the other side of the package relationship (eg. Breaks/Replaces), and official packages don't declare such things for packages outside the Debian archive. Therefore external packages are fundamentally broken, but third parties keep using them because better alternatives haven't existed in the past. > Wouldn't it be neat if such an atrocity wasn't possible? An easier way might be to make it difficult for users to install "unofficial packages", but that would be against the philosophy of users having ultimate control over their systems. Your suggestion puts us in the rather interesting situation that you're requesting a new feature for something that primarily affects third party packages that aren't actually supported in the first place.