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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

It's open source. Is there such a difference between "third-party" and "application developers who focus more on developing a web application than packaging it?"

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Okay, let me rephrase: When a project puts `curl | sudo bash` front and center as their primary method of installing that software, that's a planet-sized red flag. Not just because piping to bash is a terrible idea, but because it's an awful and silly way to install software, and it makes me suspicious of the way the rest of the project is being made.

First impressions matter. curl>bash is a bad first impression.

> it makes me suspicious of the way the rest of the project is being made

This is why we can't have nice things. Because the developer rather focus their time on developing the project instead of the arcane packaging of the various repositories, the entire project deserves to be dismissed?

Piping curl to bash is basically the same as if you download the tarball/clone the repository and running `make`, but no one bitch about that. They rather cargo-bitch about "piping curl to bash is obviously always bad and your entire project is bad if you even include curl | bash as one method of installing".

Long gone are the days where projects are judged by the quality of the project itself, and today we want to get outraged as soon as possible, at every little detail.

On the one hand, I agree. It is not good practice to blindly download and install through curlbash. On the other hand, that particular method of installation is ubiquitous nowadays. Hell even Rust presents it as the suggested method of installation[0]. Would you suggest Rust is a low-quality project? I don't think you can completely disregard something based on whether it suggests bashcurl for downloading and installing it.

Of course, in the ideal world, that's not the way it should be, but such is the reality we live in.

0: https://rustup.rs/

I have opinions about Rust, but I already get downvoted enough as it is. :)

But Rust doing it doesn't make it a good practice, and as you say yourself, it's not the way it should be. I'm just resisting the move towards an inferior standard.

EDIT: I triggered HN rate limiting with my lukewarm takes, so to the post above suggesting I'm not fun at parties: At the parties I go to, we do not talk about software packaging best practices for Linux. Thankfully.

`curl | sudo bash` is for the non-technical people who may have just sshed into a server for the first time. If you don't put it front and center, they will be lost.

The experienced sysadmins such as you and I can skip the paragraph and find an alternative we like.

Non technical people are not going to run terminal commands to install software.

We were all non-technical people once, and many of us learnt by doing just that.

If you're setting up a home server, particularly on something like a Raspberry Pi, which they mention, then you're already "slightly technical," and should know about the terminal.

Indeed, for many people setting up a home server might be the first time they're dealing with the terminal. So this is a "non-technical step into being technical."

They are, and they're going to also do a lot more worse.

You must be fun at parties. Tell me if you don't mind how many web applications did you get released with the "proper" way to install again?

Yeah, I don't like curl > bash either, but it's a distributed application that may run into many different platforms. It makes sense for them to not worry about the packaging specifics of each and let the community pick up the slack.

If all you can do is criticize an open source project that does not worship your sacred cows, the only bad impression I am left with is your project management skills.

Would you be willing to contribute code to fix the problems you see?

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