Crev: dependency vetting with a web of trust

> crev is scalable, distributed and social. Users publish and circulate results of their reviews: potentially warning about problems, malicious code, or just encuraging high quality by peer review.

I like this. It would be nice to flag questionable areas outside of the maintainer's control, for other experts to look at. Sometime's I've seen something fishy that I share with a friend/colleague who might know how to interpret it, but often times it's in a language/framework that I might not have a friend to ask.

The open source saying "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" has always been a faux pas, because there has never been enough eyeballs, especially on small projects. However, something like this could begin to close the gap. +1 from me

Some background on this:

Cargo makes it very easy to add dependencies. Rust has the same culture of small, single-purpose libraries as npm (there is https://crates.io/crates/left_pad if you're wondering).

This of course raises the question: what if someone puts some malware in a crate? Cargo itself has an OK security (and working on more end-to-end integrity checks), so it's unlikely that someone will inject malware into existing crates, but that still leaves question of trusting the original crate authors.

Rust is not a sandbox language. Even the "safe" subset of the language is still just about preventing bugs, but nowhere near a watertight sandbox required to protect programmers and users from straight-up malware running in their own program. It's not clear if that is even possible in an efficient, low-level systems programming language.

So the most reasonable way forward is to ensure that all code you use is either from people you trust, or has been verified by you or someone you trust.

Turning code reviews into a shareable artifact is a pretty cool addition here, as it reduces duplication of work across the community (you don't have to review everything personally), and helps you pick and choose who you trust.

There's some more background and vision for this software in this blog post talking specifically about the Rust ecosystem: https://dpc.pw/cargo-crev-and-rust-2019-fearless-code-reuse

It also has some nicer narrative examples.

It would be really cool if this could express claims about copyright and license, as well as code quality.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? Were you wanting people to be able to publish proofs that they've reviewed the legal standing of the code as well as the code itself for problems?