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The rust project also advocates this method of installing software on their download page. To their defense, however, they do offer gpg signatures for their tarballs, even if you need to dig around for a bit to find them.

Also, anyone suggesting that this method of downloading and installing software is secure due to its use of HTTPS is incredibly reckless.

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There's a ton of important software that people are installing over HTTP, so using HTTPS is unfortunately already super-substantial progress. Chris Palmer gave the sad example of PuTTY a couple of years ago:

https://noncombatant.org/2014/03/03/downloading-software-saf...

(after what I think was a long time, the actual download links themselves are now HTTPS, although they're all still served -- along with the signatures -- from an HTTP page)

I'm certainly not going to defend the idea that HTTPS is enough authentication for software installations (I'm writing an article related to software transparency), but there's a pretty big bootstrap problem and infrastructure gap right now.

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