There are a lot of bad to terrible takes here, ranging from hindsight 20/20 to borderline discriminatory: 3. The issue here has more to do with the generated t

There are a lot of bad to terrible takes here, ranging from hindsight 20/20 to borderline discriminatory: 3. The issue here has more to do with the generated tarball doesn't match source. You (i.e. distro owners) should be able to generate the tarball locally and compare with the generated artifact and compare. Autotools is just a scapegoat. 4. xz is used in a lot of places. Reducing dependencies is good, but trying to somehow say this is all systemd's fault, for depending on liblzma is not understanding the core issue here. The attacker could have found another dependency to social engineer into, or find a way to add dependencies and whatnot. It's very easy to say all these stuff in hindsight. 5. Again, I agree with you on principle that dependencies and complexity is a big issue and I always roll my eyes when people bring in 100's of dependencies, but xz is a pretty reputable project. I really really doubt someone would have raised an issue with adding liblzma or think that the build script would introduce a vulnerability like that. Again, a lot of hindsight talking here, instead of actually looking forward to how something like this could realistically be prevented. Too many dependencies are but it's not suddenly everyone will write their own compression libs. 6. Again, I mean, I don't disagree with you on principle but that is not the lesson from this particular incident. This may be your pet peeve but it wasn't like the integration with libsystemd would have raised anyone's alarm. 8. This is just a thinly veiled way of saying "don't work with anyone of Chinese descent". I don't want to use the R word but you know exactly what I mean. There's no evidence Jia Tan is Chinese anyway, or that this is done by China. We simply don't know right now, and as far as we know they could have used any western sounding name. The core issue here is that the trust was misplaced, and the overworked maintainer didn't try to make sure the other person is a real one (e.g. basic Googling). So what, if you don't work with any Chinese, if someone is called "Ryan Gosling" you automatically trust them? --- I do agree with point 7.