this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
206 points (96.4% liked)

Programming

17669 readers
159 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

New favorite tool ๐Ÿ˜

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] onlinepersona 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Are you seriously comparing installing from a repo or "app store" to downloading a random binary on the web and executing it?

P.S I've compiled a lot of stuff using nix, especially when it's not in the cache yet or I have to modify the package myself.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[โ€“] BatmanAoD -1 points 7 months ago

No, I agree that a package manager or app store is indeed safer than either curl-bash or a random binary. But a lot of software is indeed installed via standalone binaries that have not been vetted by package manager teams, and most people don't use Nix. Even with a package manager like apt, there are still ways to distribute packages that aren't vetted by the central authority owning the package repo (e.g. for apt, that mechanism is PPAs). And when introducing a new piece of software, it's a lot easier to distribute to a wide audience by providing a standalone binary or an install script than to get it added to every platform's package manager.