Remix.run Logo
jerf a day ago

"What makes a shell script untrustworthy, but the executable you or the script install trustworthy?"

Supply-chain attacks. Linux distros have a long history of being more hardened targets than "a static file on some much, much, much smaller project's random server".

Also things like linux packages or snaps or flatpaks are generally somewhat ringfenced by their nature. Here I don't mean for security reasons per se, but just by their nature, I have confidence a flatpak isn't going to start scribbling all over my user directory. A script may make any number of assumptions about what it is OK to do, where things can go, where to put them, what it can install, etc.

"Trust" isn't just about whether something is going to steal my cryptowallet or install a keylogger. It's about whether it breaks my reproducible ops setup, or will stick configuration in the seventeenth place in my system, or assumes other false things about how I want it set up that may cause other problems.