This is plain false. Most production-grade distribution do extensive vetting of the packages, both in terms of code and legal.

Additionally, distribution packages are tested by a significant number of users before the release.

Nothing of this sort happens around any language-specific package manager. You just get whatever happens to be around all software forges.

Unsurprisingly, there has been many serious supply chain attacks in the last 5 years. None of which affected the usual big distros.

> None of which affected the usual big distros.

I guess we can argue about "big" but didn't both Arch (https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2018-July/...) and Gentoo (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Infrastructure/Incident... and older, https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323691) have actual compromised packages? And also not five years ago, but Fedora (https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2011-Janu...) and Debian (https://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031202) had compromises but no known package changes.

No, Go modules implement a global TOFU checksum database. Obviously a compromised upstream at initial pull would not be affected, but distros (other than the well-scoped commercial ones) don’t do anything close to security audits of every module they package either. Real-world untargeted SCAs come from compromised upstreams, not long-term bad faith actors. Go modules protects against that (as well as other forms of upstream incompetence that break immutable artifacts / deterministic builds).

MVS also prevents unexpected upgrades just because someone deleted a lockfile.

> At this point I trust the Go modules supply chain considerably more than any free distro's packaging

What has happened in the package ecosystem to make you believe this? Is it velocity of updates or actual trust?

I haven’t heard of any malicious package maintainers.

Better automation ensuring packages are immutable, fewer humans in the packaging loop.

generally I prefer humans in the loop, someone to actually test things. This is why distros are stable compared to other distros which are more bleeding edge.

For SC security, the fewer points of attack between me and the source the better.

For other kinds of quality, I have my own tests which are much more relevant to my use cases than whatever the distro maintainers are doing.

I've been a DD and while distros do work to integrate disparate upstreams as well as possible, they rarely reject packages for being fundamentally low quality or make significant quality judgements qua their role as maintainer (only when they're a maintainer because they're also a direct user). Other distributions do even less than Debian.

I have seen scenarios where package maintainers have rejected updating packages because the upstream is compromised though.

Fedora currently packages 10646 crates. It's implausible that they're manually auditing each one at each upgrade for anything other than "test suites pass", let alone something like obfuscated security vulnerabilities.

In the end most distros will be saved by the fact they don't upgrade quickly. Which is also accomplished by MVS without putting another attack vector in the pipeline.

No person manages more than 250 packages (and he's a RH employee).

There's more than a hundred package maintainers (I'm not sure exactly how many), but the median is about 50 packages.

Do you think people can't keep up with the updates for 50 packages?

I think I don't want "more than a hundred" additional points of trust, especially if they're trying to audit 50+ projects with various levels of familiarity each. And no, I don't believe one person can give a real audit to 50 packages each release even if was their actual job.

To paraphrase, all "more than a hundred" of those people need to be lucky every time.