Visit Homebrew, Rustup, Oh My Zsh, nvm and few other popular open source projects website and you realise that quietly `curl -fsSL` has become the most popular package manager for Linux and Unix users 😂 How did we get here ?

[nixcraft@mastodon.social]

Visit Homebrew, Rustup, Oh My Zsh, nvm and few other popular open source projects website and you realise that quietly `curl -fsSL` has become the most popular package manager for Linux and Unix users How did we get here ? Just pipe the random commands into your shell with sudo added to the mix. What could possibly go wrong?

[xfavatax@haunted.computer]

@nixCraft Exactly why I have witnessed high level engineers fall for ClickFix attacks. Everyone is numb to "copy, paste, execute" as the default.

[moelassus@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft I weep every time I see one of these types of installations. Novice users are often ill equipped to understand the risks entailed and seeing extremely popular projects using this just method tells the novice, "this is totally normal to be asked to paste a mysterious command into my terminal”.

[churchhatestucker@mefi.social]

@nixCraft Monkey's Paw Package Manager

[edcates@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft sat through an Amazon-guided AWS lab where one of the steps entailed installing something by piping curl through sudo. I was dumbfounded that they were encouraging/normalizing this.

[thatdnaguy@genomic.social]

@nixCraft the first time I saw some of those instructions, I thought it was the hack way of doing it without a package manager. Then I realized it was THE way and was completely shocked.

[levrden@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft wouldn't it be even better to explain clearly instead of making fun of people?

[jbaert@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft i hate it when that's the only option. I often try to read the script itself and it's an obtuse mess.

[squaloujenkins@fosstodon.org]

@nixCraft now add a sudo-allowed ai agent to the mix

[cogitocomrade@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft curl is nice. Im already running some arbitrary code I haven’t read when using any of these packages, so running a script by them doesn’t seem that much less safe

[chris1776@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@nixCraft cargo install is just as bad

[uecker@mastodon.social]

@cogitocomrade @nixCraft It is far less safe. If the first step is secure, then it may be ok to put some trust in the code you run later. But with curl | this is unfounded.

[nullpotential@fedia.social]

@nixCraft yeah! we should be using aria2c. it's 2026 people come on.

[chipbarm@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft it brings some excitement into my otherwise dull life

[gabe@mendeddrum.org]

@nixCraft tired: curl | sudo bash

wired: yes | sudo bash <(curl)

[sj_zero@social.fbxl.net]

I can't say nothing, deb.fbxl.net has repos for many many operating systems, but there's exactly one command listed with a universal installer for setting up repos on many of them.

In my case it's because freebasic is a basic compiler, and the goal was to make it easy to install damn near everywhere. The problem is, there's a lot of everywhere. Just on Linux you have debian-based, RPM based, arch-based, slackware based, and within those categories you have a number of different distributions and distribution versions. And then you have Solaris and open solaris, the various bsds, haiku, windows via cygwin or mingw, not to mention MacOS, and that's just the OSes that apply to package managers and she'll scripts. Just making the machinery to produce packages for all those is tough enough, but then you're trying to figure out how to make it easy for OSes to actually just install and be capable of staying up to date afterwards.

More ideal would be getting the packages added to every distro, but that really isn't in the cards, so you're stuck playing the hand you've got.

[haerench@mastodon.social]

@jbaert @nixCraft It has become indeed quite common that I often don't want to read / check the script once again. Instead I run the curl in a pod and then copy the artifact to my system.

Where did we go wrong? Probably too many different package managers out there and/or too little time to maintain them. Even if they make an rpm /deb pkg, what guarantee you have nothing fishy happens in the postinstall?

[mikalai@privacysafe.social]

@moelassus @nixCraft
Novice users are too novice to weep 🫣

[mikalai@privacysafe.social]

@thatdnaguy @nixCraft
But isn't it convenient in one's CI pipeline? Inside of some container.
.... looking for dictionary definition of supply chain attack...

[mikalai@privacysafe.social]

@levrden @nixCraft
Jo. These folks have been talking soooo many times about it. This is their professional, slightly nervous fun.
On practical note, they really don't know how else to pass this ... trivial info, for practical end.
As a member of normal group, may be you can volunteer persvasive words.
Persvaisive for your locale at least.