PyPI now supports digital attestations

> The generation and publication of attestations happens by default, and no changes are necessary for projects that meet all of these conditions: publish from GitHub Actions; via Trusted Publishing; and use the pypa/gh-action-pypi-publish action to publish.

If you then click on "The manual way" it adds a big disclaimer:

> STOP! You probably don't need this section; it exists only to provide some internal details about how attestation generation and uploading work. If you're an ordinary user, it is strongly recommended that you use one of the official workflows described above.

Where the only official workflow is "Use GitHub Actions".

I guess I am an idealist but as a maintainer this falls short of my expectations for the openness of Python and PyPI.

The standard behind this (PEP 740) supports anything that can be used with Trusted Publishing[1]. That includes GitLab, Google Cloud, ActiveState, and can include any other OIDC IdP if people make a good case for including it.

It's not tied to Microsoft or GitHub in any particular way. The only reason it emphasizes GitHub Actions is because that's where the overwhelming majority of automatic publishing traffic comes from, and because it follows a similar enablement pattern as Trusted Publishing did (where we did GitHub first, followed by GitLab and other providers).

[1]: https://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/

> STOP! You probably don't need this section;

In https://docs.pypi.org/attestations/producing-attestations/#t...

Perhaps also add a few of the providers you listed as well?

> The only reason it emphasizes GitHub Actions is because that's where the overwhelming majority of automatic publishing traffic comes from

GitHub being popular is a self-reinforcing process, if GitHub is your first class citizen for something as crucial as trusted publishing then projects on GitHub will see a higher adoption and become the de-facto "secure choice".

I can soften it, but I think you're reading it excessively negatively: that warning is there to make sure people don't try to do the fiddly, error-prone cryptographic bits if they don't need to. It's a numerical fact that most project owners don't need that section, since most are either using manual API tokens or are publishing via GitHub Actions.

> Perhaps also add a few of the providers you listed as well?

They'll be added when they're enabled. Like I said in the original comment, we're using a similar enablement pattern as happened with Trusted Publishing: GitHub was enabled first because it represents the majority of publishing traffic, followed by GitLab and the others.

> GitHub being popular is a self-reinforcing process, if GitHub is your first class citizen for something as crucial as trusted publishing then projects on GitHub will see a higher adoption and become the de-facto "secure choice".

I agree, but I don't think this is PyPI's problem to solve. From a security perspective, PyPI should prioritize the platforms where the traffic is.

(I'll note that GitLab has been supported by Trusted Publishing for a while now, and they could make the publishing workflow more of a first class citizen, the way it is on GHA.)

To me that's a bit of a weird statement, PyPI is part of the Python foundation, making sure that the project remains true to its open-source nature is reasonable?

My concern is that these type of things ultimately play out as "we are doing the right thing to limit supply chain attacks" which is good an defendable, but in ~5 years PyPI will have an announcement that they are sunsetting PyPI package upload in favor of the trusted provider system. pip (or other tooling) will add warnings whenever I install a package that is not "trusted". Maybe I am simply pessimistic.

That being said we can agree to disagree, I am not part of the PSF and I did preface my first comment with "I guess I am an idealist".

What about this, in your estimation, undermines the open-source nature of PyPI? Nothing about this is proprietary, and I can't think of any sane definition of OSS in which PyPI choosing to verify OIDC tokens from GitHub (among other IdPs!) meaningfully subverts PyPI's OSS committment.

> PyPI package upload in favor of the trusted provider system. pip (or other tooling) will add warnings whenever I install a package that is not "trusted". Maybe I am simply pessimistic.

Let me put it this way: if PyPI disables API tokens in favor of mandatory Trusted Publishing, I will eat my shoe on a livestream.

(I was the one of the engineers for both API tokens and Trusted Publishing on PyPI. They're complementary, and neither can replace the other.)

> Let me put it this way: if PyPI disables API tokens in favor of mandatory Trusted Publishing, I will eat my shoe on a livestream.

Yeah, sure. But parent poster also mentioned pip changes. Will you commit to eating a shoe if pip verifies attestations? Of course not, you know better than I do that those changes to pip are in the works and experimental implementations already available. You must have forgotten to mention that. PyPI doesn't have to be the bad guy on making sure its a PITA to use those packages. Insert Futurama "technically correct, the best kind of correct" meme.

Insinuating dishonesty is rude, especially when it’s baseless: the post linked in this one is explicit about experimenting with verification. There’s no point in signing without verification.

pip may or may not verify attestations; I don’t control what they do. But even if they do, they will never be able to mandate them for every project: as I have repeatedly said, there is no plan (much less desire) to mandate attestation generation.