Universal Install Script by XKCD – Combat Test | Hacker News Reader

Universal Install Script by XKCD – Combat Test

ocsmag.com

63 pointslouis-paul17 comments

The line that attempts to build from source is designed to build the repository cloned from GitHub. It seems odd to remove the git clone and leave that in.

BTW, if you have git 2.3 or newer you could just disable the password prompt like so:

    GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT=0 git clone https://github.com/"$1"/"$1" $1 2>/dev/null

Feels to me like you could improve a lot of the noisiness by adding || (or) to the end of each line. So the script would stop trying things once it found something that worked. Then maybe you could reintroduce the git clone command -- coming near the end, it would rarely cause problems.

I think you mean &&?

No. && would cause the next command to begin once the previous had successfully completed. A successful install shoudn't start the next install attempt, hence ||.

On the other hand, OP and this comment miss the beauty of Randall's implementation, which is each operation is launched asynchronously ('&'), so it isn't the case that you try a few approaches one at a time, i's that you try all approaches at the same time.

cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b4rsDCg...

Wow, already down?! Someone get them a CloudFlare account!

CloudFlare is regularly blocking me (because of dynamic address I get from my provider; I have no real choice as I live in the country and not in a city) and being out-US, CloudFlare does not care at all. It is seriously the company I hate most at the net. There are so many alternatives to CloudFlare. Let's make the world a better place and use them.

> [...] There are so many alternatives to CloudFlare. [...]

Please list them (especially, those that works for you) so that we can try.

please, no more cloudflare

https://gist.github.com/jpswade/b5907dbb7210812d941040b3ebfb...

"Wow that's awesome! This could be a new defualt way to install!"

Relevant xkcd, sort of aluded to kn the end, https://xkcd.com/927/

Yeah, this is just trying a bunch of different package managers to see which one will work first.

When you run into a name collisions.

If someone wanted to really make some sort of macro package manager (or package manager to end all package managers), that's one thing, but this script is just a mistake waiting to happen)

That's the joke. That's why it was an xkcd strip.

Yeah I must have missed the sarcasm in the blog post at the end...

Actually it backgrounds /them all/; as the comic states in the caption text, failures can generally be ignored since one will have success.

But what if two succeed, but you only want one?

As someone else noted... clearly that is the joke. I got the feeling from the article that someone was seriously trying this, but i must have missed some sarcasm

They were taking the joke to its conclusion to see what happened. I think the warnings that its not really a good idea indicates they well understand it's a joke to begin with.

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