top | item 47126940

(no title)

edelbitter | 6 days ago

One particular chasm to keep an eye on, possibly even more relevant than Ubuntu using Rust: When it comes to building important stuff, Ubuntu sticks to curl|YOLO|bash instead of trusting trust in their own distributions.

https://github.com/canonical/firefox-snap/blob/90fa83e60ffef...

discuss

order

theamk|6 days ago

When people say "curl|bash", this usually means secondary fetches, random system config changes, likely adding stuff to user's .bashrc

But it's not quite that bad in this particular case - they are fetching pre-built static toolchain, and running old-school install script, just like in 1990s. The social convention for those is quite safer.

(Although I agree, it is pretty ironic that they prefer this to using ppa or binary packaged into deb...)

staticassertion|6 days ago

I don't get it. What's the chasm here?

mrweasel|6 days ago

The "issue" isn't that these new tools from Ubuntu is in Rust, that's almost irrelevant. The issue is that they are not the "standard" tools.

If Ubuntus Rust replacements aren't adopted in other distributions, or only in some of them, we get an even more fragmented Linux ecosystem. We've already seen this with the sudo-rs (which really should be called something else). It's a sudo replacement, ideal a one to one replacement, but it's not 100% and for how long? You can also think of the Curl provided by Microsoft Powershell, which isn't actually Curl and only partially provides Curl functionality, but it squats the command name.

Ubuntu might accidentally, or deliberately, create a semi-incompatible parallel Linux environment, like Alpine, but worse.

LoganDark|6 days ago

Aren't the versions of Rust in stable Linux distributions like, a century old? Or at least they were last I checked what Debian and Ubuntu LTS were distributing. I think it's because they don't like static linking.

tecoholic|6 days ago

Hasn’t the right way to install rust has always been using rust up? I am an Ubuntu user and never once tried apt for rust.

opan|6 days ago

Debian had a new stable release 45 days ago. For now I would imagine things aren't too old there. Although a friend of mine recently ran into some ancient packages on Mint, so maybe Mint/Ubuntu are oddly behind Debian Stable right now for some things.

tokyobreakfast|6 days ago

[deleted]

castis|6 days ago

should we trust someone whos HN account is just as shiny?

acomjean|6 days ago

“Done software”?

kingstnap|6 days ago

You can curl stuff and run it just gotta have hashes in place.

theamk|6 days ago

In theory, yes.

In practice, very rarely. Lots of 'curl | sh' do secondary fetches, and those don't come with hash checks. And even if they come with hash checks _today_, there is no guarantee next version won't quietly remove them.