Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go

Re:Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go by 0xbadcafebee on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @11:18AM (#41788812)

I think in an ideal world, this would be the normal case. A hierarchy of packages, maintained by many independent parties, that extend useful base functionality, without too much logic being put in any one package. If one thing doesn't work well you can just create a new package to replace the one part. And building on top of simpler, smaller modules allows you to keep code DRY, reduce maintenance burden (like the 1000 open PRs...), and easily extend functionality by simply making a new package.

That was my experience with CPAN, anyway. It's not perfect but it's miles above other language module cultures.

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Re:Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go by evanelias on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @12:01PM (#41789426)

The base functionality isn't always terribly extensible, though. And Go isn't like Perl or Ruby where you can monkey-patch arbitrary logic in a pinch.

I originally created my knownhosts wrapper to solve the problem of populating the list of host key algorithms based on the knownhosts content. Go's x/crypto/ssh provides no straightforward way to do this, as it keeps its host lookup logic largely internal, with no exported host lookup methods or interfaces. I had to find a slightly hacky and very counter-intuitive approach to get x/crypto/ssh to return that information without re-implementing it.

And to be clear, re-implementing core logic in x/crypto/ssh is very undesirable because this is security-related code.

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Re:Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go by 0xbadcafebee on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @02:41PM (#41791216)

Sometimes the hierarchy can be used without directly/perfectly extending the code. For example, in the CPAN world, you might publish your own module as "x/crypto/ssh/knownhosts/client". You don't even have to use the "x/crypto/ssh/knownhosts" code at all, it just looks like a similar namespace. (IIRC, CPAN requires a human in the loop who's moderating what new packages are listed; none of the craziness of PyPI where any insane person can release thousands of typosquatting malware modules)

You would hope a new module would reuse as much previous base modules as they can, but sometimes it's enough to just put some new code in that namespace, with the intent then that someone will find it easier, and build off of it. The hierarchy is for organization, discovery and distribution, as much as it is about good software development practice. The goal being to improve the overall software development ecosystem.

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Re:Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go by evanelias on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @03:29PM (#41791726)

For critical security-related code, I'd argue that's not a good property at all for module namespacing! Quite the opposite. Even with a human in the loop.

(and I was a professional Perl programmer for the first 5 years of my career, so I'm not asserting this out of lack of familiarity with CPAN!)

That all said: I don't even think what you're saying about CPAN is terribly similar to the situation being discussed here, since Go's x/crypto/ssh (and all other x/ packages) are officially part of the Go Project and are maintained by the Go core maintainers. See https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x. Third-party Go developers cannot add new packages to this namespace at all.

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Re:Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go by dingnuts on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @12:25PM (#41789699)

I do not mean this as a loaded question, but what happens in this model when maintainers die?

Everything you've said sounds great, with the assumption that the maintainers can maintain their pieces indefinitely and independently. But we're mortal. And I know the independent maintainers in places like CPAN are humans, not companies.

I guess it's a sign you're getting old when you start worrying about this kind of thing

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Re:Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go by 0xbadcafebee on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @02:31PM (#41791125)

Assuming people want to keep using/maintaining the code, you just prove the original maintainer has either abandoned it or died, and then you contact the repository admins (i.e. CPAN). Make your case that the original maintainer is gone and they'll probably make you the new maintainer.

If nobody wants to maintain the old code, or the design wasn't ideal, often times people will create a "v2" or "-ng" rewrite of it and try to keep backwards compatibility. Then the people who made sub-modules can simply publish their modules on top of the new base module. Old code continues running with the old dependencies until somebody links the old code to the new base module.

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