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Comment by whyever | Hacker News Reader

It's missing which point?

That you should be very careful about what you install. Cut&pasting some line from a website is the exact opposite of it. This is mostly about psychology and not technology. But there are also other issues with this, e.g. many independent failure points at different levels, no transparency, no audit chain, etc. The counter model we tried to teach people in the past is that people select a linux distribution, independently verify fingerprints of the installation media, and then only install packages from the curated a list of packages. A lot of effort went into making this safe and close the remaining issues.

None of that has anything to do with curl|bash.

Be careful who you trust when installing software is a fine thing to teach. But that doesn't mean the only people you can trust are Linux distro packagers.

I think it has a lot to do with "curl|bash". Cut&paste a curl|bash command-line disables all inherent mechanisms and stumbling blocks that would ensure properly ensuring trust. It was basically invented to make it easy to install software by circumventing all protection a Linux distribution would traditionally provide. It also eliminates all possibility for independent verification about what was installed or done on the machine.

Downloading and installing a `.deb` or `.rpm` is going to be no more secure. They can run arbitrary scripts too.

Downloading a deb via a package manager is more secure. Downloading a deb, comparing the hash (or at least noting down the hash) would also already be more secure.

But yes, that the run arbitrary scripts is also a known issue, but this is not the main point as most code you download will be run at some point (and ideally this needs sandboxing of applications to fix).

> Downloading a deb via a package manager is more secure.

Not what I meant. Getting software into 5 different distros and waiting years for it to be available to users is not really viable for most software authors.

I think it would be quite viable if there is any willingness to work with the distributions in the interest in security.

Well, distros haven't really put any effort into making it viable as far as I know. They really should! Why isn't there a standard Linux package format that all distros support? Flatpak is fine for user GUI apps but I don't think it would be feasible to e.g. distribute Rust via a Flatpak.

(And when I say fine, I haven't actually used it successfully yet.)

I think distros don't want this though. They all want everyone to use their format, and spend time uploading software into their repo. Which just means that people don't.

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