alt Hacker News> how on earth do we keep things safe and secure if everyone can see the code and verify what it does!
That's not always the silver bullet you seem to think it is. Have you ever tried to build something like Chromium, Firefox, or LLVM yourself? It's not realistic to do that on a mid tier let alone low end device.
Even when you go to the trouble of getting a local build set up, more often than not the build system immediately attempts to download opaque binary blobs of uncertain provenance. Try building some common pieces of software in a network isolated environment and you will likely be surprised at how poorly it goes.
If projects actually took this stuff seriously then you'd be able to bootstrap from a sectorlisp and pure human readable source code without any binary blobs or network access involved. Instead we have the abomination that is npm.
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For context, I once found a bug in Chromium and fixed it, the initial build took a few days on and off on my development laptop that was pretty beefy for the time. I say on and off because I had to interrupt the build if I wanted to do anything else computationally taxing. They have incremental builds and caches all properly set up so you can just continue where you left off after the fact. After the initial build it's pretty fast, 5 minutes or so per build for me. On a low end device you're easily looking at a build time of a week or more if you're starting from scratch.
LLVM isn't so bad compared to the browsers. Relatively standard CMake build with mostly self contained c++ codebase and few third party dependencies. You don't need a crazy thread ripper workstation to do a build in reasonable time. A somewhat modern 8-16 core desktop CPU should be able to do it in 10-20 minutes or faster. Based on compilation benchmarks I have seen even some of 15 year old 4 core CPUs or 5year old mid/low tier mobile CPUs do it under hour.
Most importantly you need to pay attention to RAM usage, if necessary reducing parallelism so that it doesn't need to swap.
Debian manages to build Chromium, Firefox, and LLVM on servers of multiple architectures, including quite slow riscv64 machines, without any network access to the builds for any architecture.
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=firefox-esr
See Bootstrappable Builds for starting from almost nothing, so far only GNU Guix and StageX have worked out how to start from the BB work to get a full distro. Should be fairly trivial for other distros too if they cared.
https://bootstrappable.org/ https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-bui... https://stagex.tools/