Why curl | sudo bash is a good thing

Assuming that you're sufficiently competent to understand what you're reading, of course -- and smart enough at shell scripting to be able to recognize all the little wrinkles that a malicious scripter could use to make bad code look safe.

Oh, and that the shell script isn't just downloading a binary blob, either, since if it does that you'd have no way to know what's in that blob. Of course, you ran the shell script as root, so if it does download a binary blob that blob could modify just about anything it wants to.

> What about dependencies? Does your platform have all the required dependencies? Are they new enough (no, unless you're on the most recent version). So now you also need to add a repository for all of these platforms to get updated dependencies. All of these are going to need to be backported and maintained for multiple versions by someone.

But that work is already being done, at least for most popular Linux distributions. The repositories already exist, people are already packaging software for them, other people are handling backports and maintenance. All that infrastructure has been built. So saying "someone's going to have to build a lot of infrastructure!" isn't a very compelling argument.