it would be better if there were stronger community moderation and review that has stamps i can trust rather than this idea that eyeballing build scripts is a reasonable security posture.
Ok, so instead of having a reasonable security posture yourself, you'd rather rely on a number of random strangers who've eyeballed the PKGBUILD instead?
Generally, I think Arch tries to prevent users from relying on bad signals, and this principle might be applied here too.
> i read all the pkgbuild diffs, still doesn't give me a good sense. sure,
Do you have an example of a diff that doesn't give a good sense? I review all my diffs too, but I feel like all of them give me a good sense if it's safe to install or not. I mean, why would I otherwise, what's the point in reviewing if you don't use it to make a decision if to install it or not?
What else do you have to review? Both in the cases of binaries and source, the idea is that you trust upstream already, otherwise you shouldn't install software from them. And since you trust upstream, the only thing you need to review in the PKGBUILD is quite literally: Where is this stuff coming from, is it the official domain/repository? Are there other non-official dependencies? Are there patches applied?
Once you've reviewed those, you're done, and as safe as if you installed straight from upstream, zero false sense of security here.
You're mixing concerns here, as what you describe is completely different issue.
there is work involved in figuring out how to get the complete diff of the code and dependencies that are included in the change, plus review time. this could range anywhere from 5-10m to 1h per package updated- if not more.
The officially maintained repositories (which are part of a default installation) were not affected. Users need to go somewhat out of their way to use an AUR.
The definition files are all plain text and not especially complicated. It's not too difficult to glance at the file before doing an install to get a basic idea of what it's about to do, just like you should do when running a random shell script or cloning a random git repo. Indeed, most AURs are implemented by cloning an upstream git repo and configuring it so it can be built. The same basic threat model applies: Do you trust the install script? Do you trust the upstream URL whose code it is about to compile?