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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Because some people believe tools exist to make lives easier, not to evangelize some sort of ideology. A lot of people use AWS; adding helpers for it into commonly-used tools can make people's lives easier.

And beyond that, there a bunch of clones of various AWS APIs, both in other proprietary products, and in open source alternatives. I bet this functionality works with those, too.

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It's quite a clean extension that can be disabled at compile time. It doesn't complicate the rest of curl, and provides a useful way to invoke any AWS API from the CLI without needing a giant AWS library dependency.

It's well worth a thousand lines of code.

https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/b9fea261e632b9493ea6038bfb...

As an open source maintainer, this is what I would consider a slippery slope. Sure, this one is well-specified and "not that complex" until N years later there are 30 compile-time flags for all sorts of vendor-specific features and a new CVE every week from the massive increase in highly-use-case-specific code to maintain.

I’m not that familiar with AWS innards. Can you explain how this one flag can access any API?

AWS uses one algorithm to authenticate requests against all of its APIs. Many of its APIs accept simple query parameters or JSON, making them easy to call with curl.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/reference_a...

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