this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Mildly Infuriating

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Home to all things "Mildly Infuriating" Not infuriating, not enraging. Mildly Infuriating. All posts should reflect that.

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When software devs expect you to pipe a script straight from the internet into Bash... (dubvee.org)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Developers: I will never ever do that, no one should ever do that, and you should be ashamed for guiding people to. I get that you want to make things easy for end users, but at least exercise some bare minimum common sense.

The worst part is that bun is just a single binary, so the install script is bloody pointless.

Bonus mildly infuriating is the mere existence of the .sh TLD.

Edit b/c I'm not going to answer the same goddamned questions 100 times from people who blindly copy/paste the question from StackOverflow into their code/terminal:

WhY iS ThaT woRSe thAn jUst DoWnlOADing a BinAary???

  1. Downloading the compiled binary from the release page (if you don't want to build yourself) has been a way to acquire software since shortly after the dawn of time. You already know what you're getting yourself into
  2. There are SHA256 checksums of each binary file available in each release on Github. You can confirm the binary was not tampered with by comparing a locally computed checksum to the value in the release's checksums file.
  3. Binaries can also be signed (not that signing keys have never leaked, but it's still one step in the chain of trust)
  4. The install script they're telling you to pipe is not hosted on Github. A misconfigured / compromised server can allow a bad actor to tamper with the install script that gets piped directly into your shell. The domain could also lapse and be re-registered by a bad actor to point to a malicious script. Really, there's lots of things that can go wrong with that.

The point is that it is bad practice to just pipe a script to be directly executed in your shell. Developers should not normalize that bad practice.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

They should really put the npm installation first

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I saw many cases of this with windows PowerShell and those Window debloating scripts

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

PowerShell has a system to sign scripts, and with its default configuration, will refuse to execute scripts, and with the more sensible configuration you should switch to if you actually use PowerShell, refuses to execute unsigned scripts from the Internet.

I suspect that most of the scripts you're referring to just set -ExecutionPolicy Bypass to disable signature checking and run any script, though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago 
Invoke-WebRequest | Invoke-Expression

bypasses signature checking because there is no file to be signed

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

You are correct

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

That's becoming alarmingly common, and I'd like to see it go away entirely.

Random question: do you happen to be downloading all of your Kindle books? 😜

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you find this more than mildly infuriating.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

I think you and a lot of others are late to the idea that mildly is kinda like a joke. Many things are majorly infuriating. On the reddit, many of their top posts aren't even major. They're catastrophic, just absurd. I've yet to find anything mild

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

tbf, every time you're installing basically anything at all, you basically trust whoever hosts the stuff that they don't temper with it. you're already putting a lot of faith out there, and i'm sure a lot of the software actually contains crypto-mineware or something else.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago

I wouldn't call anyone who does this, a developer. No offense, but its a horrible practice, that usually come from hacky projects.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What's that? A connection problem? Ah, it's already running the part that it did get... Oops right on the boundary of rm -rf /thing/that/got/cut/off. I'm angry now. I expected the script maintainer to keep in mind that their script could be cut off at litterally any point... (Now what is that set -e the maintainer keeps yapping about?)

Can you really expect maintainers to keep network error in mind when writing a Bash script?? I'll just download your script first like I would your binary. Opening yourself up to more issues like this is just plain dumb.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Doesn't it download the entire script before piping it?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

It runs the curl command which tries to fetch the entire script. Then no matter what it got (the intended script, half the script, something else because somebody tampered with it) it just runs it without any extra checks.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

I'll do it if it's hosted on Github and I can look at the code first but if it's proprietary? Heck no

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

What's a good package manager right now for stuff like this if i don't want to use the distro package manager though? I want up to date versions of these tools, ideally shipped by the devs themselves, with easy removal and updates. Is there any right now? I think Homebrew is like that? But I wish it didn't need creating an entire new user and worked on a user account basis.

In an ideal world, i would want to use these tools in such a way that I can uninstall them, including any tool data (cache, config, etc), and update them in a reliable manner. Most of these tools are also hellbent on creating a new "." folder or file in the home folder ignoring the XDG spec.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Nix. I use it for everything, including all of my tools I use on my work MacBook.

There are many ways to use nix for this stuff, but personally I use home-manager in a flake-based setup. Versions of tools are all pinned in a lockfile which is committed to source control, so it's easy to get my config and all my tools on a new machine without any breakage (it does require installing first, though).

It's a great tool and has largely solved the pain of dealing with having to work on MacOS, for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Do you know of any Nix projects which are basically nix-but-as-if-was-brew?

I get that this violates the Nix philosophy, but it’s hard convincing collabs to install a root package manager, which has install commands like:

nix profile install nixpkgs/nixos-24.11#hello

I get that it’s flexible, but I would like something more like:

nix install hello

I want three things:

  1. rootless
  2. can manage “casks”
  3. global cli with support for per-project flakes

Do you know if this exists / is being developed?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago
  1. Supposedly there's a way to install nix without root access, but I can't speak to it as I've never tried. Ofc it doesn't require sudo to install packages or anything, though.
  2. I don't think it does this right now, largely because it's super fucking complicated (as is basically everything Apple) and homebrew casks themselves have had a ton of headaches around it. But nevertheless, I think home-manager has some workarounds it uses itself to enable many common GUI apps on MacOS.
  3. Not sure exactly what you mean, but I think it does that?

If you want to install packages purely by name, you can use nix-env -i hello or whatever. But it's pretty janky and not really a recommended way of doing things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Nix is a great suggestion and I think i will be using it moving forward as well. Thanks. Ideally I want to use NixOS, do you know if secure boot is still a pain point with NixOS?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It says in the comment of the script:

npm install

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

npm is JS-specific

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

if i don't want to use the distro package manager

I'm stunned you don't understand why this is a problem.

This was absolutely trivial stuff before the great Y2K layoffs, so if you can't figure it out, ask someone who was releasing software professionally back then.

And please, if you learn something from this, try to help others.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I don't want to use a distro package manager for certain software because nearly every distro except Arch requires adding third party repositories which can stop getting updates at any second.

Don't worry, I understand the intricacies of these problems a lot more deeply than you probably realise. As a developer, it can suck when your "hotfix" cools down by the time a distro gets around to packaging it. And as a packager, you're human in the end. As a user though, you just want stuff to work.

As a longtime Linux user, this isn't really a problem for me, none of this is. But what about a new user? We need to address these issues at some point if we want Linux to be truly user-friendly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

4.Since MS bought github, github is no longer trustworthy. Databreaches etc have increased since MS owns github. Distribution of malware via github as well. What is the 4 point supposed to say?

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