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by DaiPlusPlus 532 days ago
Your step 1 violated my very hard rule against piping curl into a shell.

…and is ironic advice for a safety-critical system, no?

——-

(Yes, I’ve read arp242.net/curl-to-sh.html - but my point being that as I’d be new to Ada then I don’t know who to trust; I’ve never heard of getada.dev therefore I don’t trust it)
3 comments
ajdude 532 days ago
It's an understandable rule, and you can definitely just download the binary from alire.ada.dev and add it to $PATH but with such a harsh stigma around how difficult it is to get the toolchain set up, GetAda follows the precedent of Rust, where you can grab the toolchain via "curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh" (thanks to Rustup).

It was received positively at the time:

Show HN: Getada: rustup-like installer for Ada's toolchain/package manager 194 points | 115 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40132373

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samatman 532 days ago
Is it really so bad to run it twice, with cat/bat replaced with sh on the second pass? If you're really paranoid about it you could save the first run to a file, so you know for certain that the server didn't do a switcheroo for the second one, but if you think about it, that's a low-payout move for Bad Guy #N compared to just sending the pwnage the first time around.

This is beside the fact that we're talking about downloading and running a user-owned binary, which, unlike the shell script, is impractical to inspect in any detail, and has the same privileges as the shell script we're supposed to worry about.

I view "don't curl to shell" as about 90% theatrics basically. Sure, read it first, I do in fact do that. But it's a silly 'very hard rule'.

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jerf 532 days ago
I routinely save to a file before execution, but it's not really about being attacked. It's about the fact that those scripts, in order to be "fire and forget", make many assumptions, often very large ones, about where I want things or under what user, etc.

Many of them are actually quite well-written under the hood and can be easily moved to other directories, have comments about what it is doing, etc.

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pjmlp 531 days ago
Here are the Rust installation instructions, that apparently is sooo much better,

https://www.rust-lang.org/learn/get-started

> The primary way that folks install Rust is through a tool called Rustup, which is a Rust installer and version management tool.

A couple of lines below

> curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

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