Musing on decentralized publishing #52
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Good idea by @momack2, add an intro, conclusion, further work summary and table of contents |
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Decentralized identity is going to take a while to shake out, I think... but when it does, I can image a world where people just publish their packages under their own identity using a common toolset, and then later on those get aggregated together to form indexes - basically the inverse of how things happen now. |
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Going to be moving the content of this issue into the |
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@agentofuser may also be interested in this re "federated indexes" =] |
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Some more thoughts on decentralized dependency resolution, will merge them into the main body as part of #53 ResolutionDecentralized dependency resolution is tricky! For a decentralized package manager to work as effectively as a centralized package manager, a few implicit features need to become explicit: Lockfile dependency dataMany package managers have a concept of a lockfile that acts as a snapshot of a successfully resolved dependency tree for an application. This allows for the installation of the same set of dependencies without having to do any dependency resolution. Lockfiles also sometimes contain a cryptographic hash of every dependency to ensure that the downloaded contents matches exactly, not just matches by name/number. Unfortunately when a user comes to make a change to the applications dependency tree, either by adding a new dependency or updating the version of an existing dependency, the lockfile does not always contain enough information to be able to re-resolve the new dependency tree. In this situation, the program resolving the dependency tree must go in search of more information about available versions from the registries that it originally downloaded the information from. One such situation is where the newly added dependency requires an existing package in the lockfile but at a different version that previously resolved. The lockfile is created at the end of dependency resolution but rather than storing all the possibly acceptable versions, it only includes the minimal list, usually just the latest, as dictated by the resolution algorithm. Only storing a single acceptable version for each dependency means that when conflicts arise whilst adding/updating the dependency graph, external data needs to be fetched from the original indexes, which re-introduces the potential issues of registry index availability. Availability of dependency metadataCentralized registry: when publishing a package, you can assume that the dependencies of that package are already available in that registry, that there is only one instance of each of those dependencies and that they are unlike to disappear. When a consumer depends on a single centralized registry, they have little choice but ensure that their application's dependency tree requirements are satisfied by the dependency metadata in the centralized registry, as they do not have the ability to easily change the registry data to match their needs. Decentralized registry: When a package is added to a package index, the publisher needs to ensure that the indexes for the dependencies of that package are also present in that index. This is because, unlike with a centralized registry, decentralized networks need to be resilient to parts being unavailable. If packages have dependencies across multiple registries, the availability of the full dependency graph requires 100% of those referenced registries to be accessible. In a fully decentralized world, it's not hard to imagine an application that depends on 100 packages from across 100 different registries (see go-ipfs for example which has 125 dependencies from unique git repositories). The likelihood of any one of those registries being unreachable increases linearly as the number of registries involved increases. Similarly, when working offline or within a private network (or on Mars!), makes most, if not all registries unavailable. Large companies are already well aware of the risk associated with depending on the availability of registries they don't control, opting instead to either vendor dependencies directly into their source code repositories or mirror dependencies into self-hosted registries such as artifactory or sonotype nexus. Resilient resolutionOne potential solution to these problems is to record and store the all dependency metadata that went into resolving a dependency tree along with the lockfile as well as including that same data along side a package when a release is published. Most package managers currently need data from at least three places when adding/updating (and possibly even removing) dependencies on a software project:
Many centralized package managers combine those last two together To make this process more resilient to availability problems, both the project's current dependencies and the proposed package's dependencies could be stored as small indexes themselves, including lists of all acceptable versions of each dependency for both project and package. Rather than only storing the latest acceptable version for each dependency, if a list of all acceptable versions that were available at the time of resolution were stored that would remove the need to fetch more dependency data from a separate remote index, let's call these "Portable Packages". To see what makes a portable package interesting, let's first look at a regular package from a centralized package manager like rubygems or npm. A standard package is usually delivered as a tarball of source code and a manifest file. This manifest file contains metadata about the package, including it's name, description, license, author and more. It also includes a list of dependency requirements for the direct dependencies of that package, see for example react 16.8.6's package.json: When you add this release of react to your application, the manifest contains the first level of dependency requirements but does not contain enough information about each one of the declared dependencies to be to be usable during installation. Instead you need to go to a registry to request dependency data about each one of the dependencies recursively for all further dependencies that each of the first level requirements. A "portable package" on the other hand would be published along with a snapshot of the transitive dependency data that would be required to resolve the full dependency tree from the requirements specified in the manifest file. This data would be collected at the point of publishing, looking for all possible variants of the dependencies that will successfully resolve for the top level manifest and then encoding them into a package index, comprised of version indexes for each possible dependency. This effectively preloads the http requests that would need to made to a registry, so dependency resolution can be performed without needing to make any extra network requests. Similarly the same approach can be used along side the lockfile in an application, storing not just the latest resolved version number for each dependency, but a version index of possibly acceptable versions for the current dependency tree. Storing these extra acceptable versions again means that you can avoid the need to load extra dependency data when attempting to add a package to the dependency tree because the data is available locally. Having that data available locally will provide a significant speedup to resolution for large dependency trees, SAT solving over http is very slow. Another potential speed improvement would come from the fact that the data available locally is prefiltered, it only contains data that would correctly satisfy a valid dependency tree. The act of adding a new "portable package" then becomes a task of testing to see if the package's index can be combined with the lockfile's index. There are also a number of possible different options for how much data to store, some package managers allow the use of multiple different dependency resolution strategies, so prefiltering dependency data may not be desirable for them. A hybrid approach could also be introduced, when adding a new package, if local dependency resolution fails then attempt to reach out to upstream registries to look for missing releases of dependencies that may break the conflict, adding those releases to the lockfile along with their indexes before attempting local dependency resolution again. Unsolved problemsProblems that decentralized publishing introduces that "portable packages" doesn't appear to help solve: Name conflicts - what happens when trying to merge two package indexes that contain the same named package or the when trying to merge two version indexes that contain the same numbered release? Trust and security - when adding a package that brings along a number of dependencies, how can you trust that those packages are secure? Order of updates - With a centralized registry, the order of applying dependency updates doesn't usually cause any issues because you do them all at once, would it be possible to add multiple "portable packages" at once to avoid situations where one order could result in a conflict where another may not? Portable registriesThis thinking also has nice alignment with the Portable Registries, Cocoapods and Homebrew both have support for pulling their registries locally and resolving dependencies offline These package managers also allow publishers to create their own registries, although the practice of including a packages dependencies within those registries is not once I've seen. |
I really like this idea, and look forward to exploring it further. Having multiple signatures (or other forms of trust-communication) point at a package index could be very powerful. If systems are correctly designed to keep these kinds of metadata be attachable and outside of the index tree itself (rather than being embedded), it makes them fairly easy to compose. One example application could be a human publishing a source version of something and signing it with their authorship keys... and other automated system picking that up, compiling and testing it, and publishing that and the logs of that computation signed by its own key, using this as an assertion that the package actually works. |
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I also really like this whole comment. Some nits on naming though. In particular, on "portable package". Two things:
This sentence using the "portable package" term doesn't actually seem to suggest that the index snapshot data goes inside the distributable artifact, so while I like what the sentence as a whole says, it's kind of antiresonant with the impression I get from the term itself. Rephrasing the quoted term might make this easier to digest. |
I started thinking about what the parts of a fully decentralized package manager would look like, ignoring to a certain extent what the actual technology doing the work would be, as a follow up from #50.
In the majority of issues we've discussed mirroring and supporting existing package manager registries that generally take the form of a centralized authority managing publishing to a particular index.
The exception being Registry-less package managers like Go, Swift, Carthage, Deno etc that use DNS as the centralized authority and package/release identifiers are URLs, sometimes with shorthands for GitHub urls.
Some terminology:
Release: The actual artifact of software being published as source code and/or binary, usually delivered as a compressed archive (tar, zip etc), they may contain some metadata about the contents but do not know their own CID within a content addressable system like IPFS.
Version index:: Data for a collection of one or more of releases of a particular software project, including the human readable name/number of each release, the content address of the release and usually some integrity data to confirm the content at that address matches what was expected, with IPFS that comes for free. It may also contain some information about the state of each release (deprecated, insecure etc).
Version index owner: A record of one or more identities that can do one or more of the following to a version index:
In a content addressable world, they are actually publishing a new version of a version index.
Package index: Data for a collection of one or more Version Indexes, including the human readable name for each version index and it's content address.
Package index owner: A record of one or more identities that can do one or more of the following to a package index:
In a content addressable world, they are actually publishing a new version of a Package index when making one of those changes.
Identity
Identity and permissions around changing indexes depending on the category of package manager.
For example:
File system based: These usually store releases, version indexes and package indexes all within the same root filesystem, meaning that the administrators of that system usually have permission to update all indexes, those administrators also the ability to make more administrators but must trust them with all indexes.
Git based: These usually store releases, version indexes and package indexes all within the same git repository, meaning that the administrators of that repository usually have permission to update all indexes, those administrators also the ability to make more administrators but must trust them with all indexes.
Database based: These tend to have more fine grained permissions, identities can be given limited access to only certain version indexes, and only the ability to update information about those version indexes in the package indexes. Those identities often have the ability to manage access to those version indexes by other identities as well. Access can also be limited to certain actions like disabling deleting data from indexes. Administrators of the database have access to all indexes.
Registry-less: The permission setup can vary with url based setups, administrators who control the DNS for a domain will have the ultimate ability to change the data available from urls on that domain, although usually the web server that the DNS record resolves to takes care of permission setups, any administrator of that web server usually also has access to change the data for that domain.
One difference with registry-less systems is that there is usually no single administrator that has control DNS of all domains involved (ignoring top level DNS authorities like ICANN), although within a private network, a network administrator can override certain levels of DNS configuration but other security features like TLS may limit functionality in that case.
In a decentralized package manager, identity and access controls require a different approach due to the lack of an administrator that has access over the whole system.
Rather than there being just one version index for a project with a unique, human readable name, there can be instead any number of instances of a version index for a project, each one owned by an identity which factors into the globally unique name for that version index.
Because there is no central naming authority, any identity has the ability to publish a new release of a project and update their own copy of a version index to include that release.
For example, below are two different version indexes created by two different identities, which share the first two releases:
{ "owner_identity": "dave:4ba0d198425a112c335a112c334e92848d76905e69a60de3f57e", "version_index_name": "libfoo", "releases": [ { "number": "1.0.1", "cid": "Qm2453256c...510b2" }, { "number": "1.0.2", "cid": "Qm3f53392...4f877" } ] }{ "owner_identity": "lucy:dc99e9aa86fab83a062cff5e0808391757071a3d5dbb942802d5", "version_index_name": "libfoo", "releases": [ { "number": "1.0.1", "cid": "Qm2453256c...510b2" }, { "number": "1.0.2", "cid": "Qm3f53392...4f877" }, { "number": "1.0.3", "cid": "Qm20d2ca...b41a4" } ] }Those indexes are effectively named
%{owner_identity}:%{version_index_name}, for examplelucy:dc99e9aa86fab83a062cff5e0808391757071a3d5dbb942802d5:libfoo, but these names are not very meaningful or memorable to humans.Note: I'm skimming over content addressability and versioning of version indexes for simplicity here
Package indexes also have a similar naming approach, where the owner has curated a number of version indexes together. Again any identity has the ability to publish a new package index, for example, two similar package indexes with libfoo from different version indexes:
{ "owner_identity": "molly:f6f7e983afc59354c91673d637c22072ec68f710794f899ae747", "package_index_name": "lib_node_modules", "version_indexes": { "libfoo": "lucy:dc99e9aa86fab83a062cff5e0808391757071a3d5dbb942802d5:libfoo", "libbar": "fred:d0cfc2e5319b82cdc71a33873e826c93d7ee11363f8ac91c4fa3:libbar", "libbaz": "anna:55579b557896d0ce1764c47fed644f9b35f58bad620674af23f3:libbaz" } }{ "owner_identity": "andrew:d979885447a413abb6d606a5d0f45c3b7809e6fde2c83f0df", "package_index_name": "lib_node_modules", "version_indexes": { "libfoo": "dave:4ba0d198425a112c335a112c334e92848d76905e69a60de3f57e:libfoo", "libbar": "fred:d0cfc2e5319b82cdc71a33873e826c93d7ee11363f8ac91c4fa3:libbar", "libbaz": "anna:55579b557896d0ce1764c47fed644f9b35f58bad620674af23f3:libbaz" } }Note here how a package index can provide human-meaningful names to version indexes that it includes. The standalone version index
"dave:4ba0d1...3f57e:libfoo"is mapped to a short readable namelibfoo, much in the same way that a version index provides a mapping between the content address of a release and it's human-meaningful number,"dave:4ba0d1...3f57e:libfoo"maps the content addressQm3f53392...4f877to the number1.0.2.This is same mapping happens in centralized registries but it is usually implicit rather than explicit, the npm module
reactby default a shorthand for https://registry.npmjs.org/react, but an end user may choose to override that default and point to a private registry instead for their project:https://internal-npm-registry.enterprise.com/react.Dependencies
When a software project declares a dependency on another software project via it's package manager configuration, the usual practice to specify the short human-meaningful name and an acceptable range of releases that it should work with.
Because a release can be included in many version indexes and package indexes, the release itself usually declares it's dependency requirements in a index agnostic approach. For example, rather than specifying the full URL (
https://registry.npmjs.org/react) of a dependency, a short name or alias is usedreact, this allows different registries to host the same packages without needing to rewrite the metadata for every package with their specific registry details.This is key for decentralized package managers as the package index name (
andrew:d979885447a413abb6d606a5d0f45c3b7809e6fde2c83f0df:lib_node_modules) is much less human-meaningful than a centralized registry url.Acceptable version numbers in dependency requires have similar properties, when declaring a range of acceptable versions, the author is encouraged to be as broad as possible in acceptable version ranges so as to reduce the likelihood of conflicts with other packages requirements of that same dependency during resolution.
Unlike package names, version number requirements for dependencies may also attempt to take into account future releases that are likely to work with that release, for example using semantic versioning to allow for minor patch releases whilst avoiding major breaking change releases.
From a decentralized package manager's point of view the key attribute of dependency requirements are that they are agnostic to the exact name of the version and package indexes used, instead preferring the local names (
react) and number ranges (>= 1.0.0) which are defined within the indexes that the end user chooses to use.Discovery
One of the more challenging problems with decentralized package management is that of discovery, finding information about packages in a network. There are three main categories of discovery:
Search
Search is the initial starting point of finding an open source package that solves a problem for you, for example "a library to parse xml documents in javascript". This usually involves searching for keyword matches across names, descriptions, tags and other textual metadata, with the aim of finding and comparing details of various matches, resulting in the address of one or more version indexes.
In centralized registries, relevant data from the package index is often replicated to a separate, specialized full-text-search index. More general web search engines like Google also index the contents of individual html package pages.
In a decentralized environment there won't be an automatic index created of every package published, services may need to be built to help index the variety of new indexes and packages being published, things like:
Resolution
Once you have a package that you wish to install, say
react, there is are two further stages of discovery that happen before the installation is complete:A version index needs to be discovered for that package which provides list of available releases, of which one will be chosen to be installed that doesn't conflict with other existing package requirements usually the newest or highest number.
A specific release many declare a number of dependencies by name,
[email protected]has four dependencies with version range requirements:For each one of those dependencies the same two discovery steps need to be performed until the full dependency tree has been resolved.
In a centralized registry this stage of discovery usually involves looking up existing version indexes within the same database, some even have specialized APIs to query the indexes in bulk because the data is all stored in the same place.
This process can also fail in two ways:
If you cannot find a version index to match the package name you are searching for, the classic example is
left-padwhere a popular package's version index was removed from the central registry completely and many users couldn't successfully install that package.If you cannot find a release number within a version index that satisfies all of the dependency requirements for that package that other packages with depend on it have specified. This may be because an existing release has been removed, or because one of the dependency requirements specifies a release number that conflicts with other dependency requirements within the same tree.
One way that decentralized publishing can help minimize these kinds of discovery problems is via validation on or before the publishing of indexes, ensuring that there are no unreachable parts of a dependency tree within an index, and then automatically advising on how to find and correct those errors if they are caught.
Updates
Existing software packages often have multiple releases published as bugs are found and fixed or functionality improvements added. When these new releases are published, end users of the package need a way of finding out that those new versions are available.
This usually is done by adding the new release to existing version indexes, there are also services that can announce new updates via email, rss, push notifications or even as a direct request to update that dependency requirement within a codebase such as Dependabot.
There may also be updates to be discovered about existing releases, such as a state change ("This release has been marked as deprecated") or a security vulnerability or legal notice has been published about it, although the contents of the release is not expected to change, the metadata about it within a version index may be updated to reflect the change.
Whilst centralized registries make it very easy to have update information available to all users, it also makes it harder for end users to opt-out of getting that update information which can have a negative impact on the reproducibility of a projects dependency tree, either due to data being removed or new data being added that changes the results of dependency resolution in an undesirable manner.
Tooling
When it comes to decentralized publishing, and consuming those decentralized indexes, new tooling will need to be built to help encourage the use of standards and compatibility between indexes as well as extra services for aiding in some of the discovery problems that arise. Experimenting and finding out what those tools might look like would be a useful task to think about before starting to implement decentralized publishing.
One other aspect that I've yet to explore is the idea that version and package index "owners" don't need to be humans, but could instead be software that does the heavy lifting of publishing and curating indexes together. This could open the door to multiple levels of identities of ownership and connection between different indexes, perhaps even federations of indexes that get combined together by groups or communities of end users.
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