this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025

278 points (91.9% liked)

Mildly Infuriating

36840 readers

548 users here now

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

I want my day mildly ruined, not completely ruined. Please remember to refrain from reposting old content. If you post a post from reddit it is good practice to include a link and credit the OP. I'm not about stealing content!

It's just good to get something in this website for casual viewing whilst refreshing original content is added overtime.

Rules:

1. Be Respectful

Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.

Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.

...

2. No Illegal Content

Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.

That means: -No promoting violence/threats against any individuals

-No CSA content or Revenge Porn

-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)

...

3. No Spam

Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.

-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.

-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.

-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers

-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.

...

4. No Porn/Explicit

Content

-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.

-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.

...

5. No Enciting Harassment,

Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts

-Do not Brigade other Communities

-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.

-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.

-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.

...

6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.

-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.

-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.

...

7. Content should match the theme of this community.

-Content should be Mildly infuriating.

-The Community !actuallyinfuriating has been born so that's where you should post the big stuff.

...

8. Reposting of Reddit content is permitted, try to credit the OC.

-Please consider crediting the OC when reposting content. A name of the user or a link to the original post is sufficient.

...

Also check out:

Partnered Communities:

1.Lemmy Review

2.Lemmy Be Wholesome

3.Lemmy Shitpost

4.No Stupid Questions

5.You Should Know

6.Credible Defense

Reach out to LillianVS for inclusion on the sidebar.

All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

278

When software devs expect you to pipe a script straight from the internet into Bash... (dubvee.org)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

76 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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???

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
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.
Binaries can also be signed (not that signing keys have never leaked, but it's still one step in the chain of trust)
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.

(page 2) 26 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

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

Can you actually explain what concerns you have, that wouldnt be any more of a concern if you downloaded and installed a binary directly?

At least a shell script you can read in plaintext, a binary can just do who the fuck knows what.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (6 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 3 days ago (1 children)

It says in the comment of the script:

npm install

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

npm is JS-specific

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 days 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 3 days 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.

load more comments (4 replies)

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

I'm with you, OP. I'll never blindly do that.

Also, to add to the reasons that's bad:

you can put restrictions on a single executable. setuid, SELinux, apparmor, etc.
a simple compromise of a Web app altering a hosted text file can fuck you
it sets the tone for users making them think executing arbitrary shell commands is safe

I recoil every time I see this. Most of the time I'll inspect the shell script but often if they're doing this, the scripts are convoluted as fuck to support a ton of different *nix systems. So it ends up burning a ton of time when I could've just downloaded and verified the executable and have been done with it already.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days 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?

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

I'm curious, op, do you think it's bad to install tools this way in an automated fashion, such as when developing a composed docker image?

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

Protect from accidental data damage: for example the dev might have accidentally pushed an untested change where there's a space in the path

rm -rf / ~/.thatappconfig/locatedinhome/nothin.config

a single typo that will wipe the whole drive instead of just the app config (yes, it happened, I remember clearly more a decade ago there was a commit on GitHub with lots of snarky comments on a script with such a typo)

Also: malicious developers that will befriend the honest dev in order to sneak an exploit.

Those scripts need to be universal, so there are hundreds of lines checking the Linux distro and what tools are installed, and ask the user to install them with a package manager. They require hours and hours of testing with multiple distros and they aren't easy to understand too... isn't it better to use that time to simply write a clear documentation how to install it?

Like: "this app requires to have x, y and z preinstalled. [Instructions to install said tools on various distros], then copy it in said subdirectory and create config in ~/.ofcourseinhome/"

It's also easier for the user to uninstall it, as they can follow the steps in reverse

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Yes I understand all of that, but also in the context of my docker containers I wouldn't be losing any data that isn't reproducible

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

I'll die on the hill that curl | bash is fine if you're installing software that self updates - very common for package managers like other comments already illustrated.

If you don't trust the authors, don't install it (duh).

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

You really should use some sort of package manager that has resistance against supply chain attacks. (Think Linux distros)

You probably aren't going to get yourself in trouble by downloading some binary from Github but keep in mind Github has been used for Malware in the past.

load more comments