moonpiedumplings

Straying away from utilities, games are always fun to host. I got started with self hosting by hosting a minecraft server, but there are plenty of options.

So instead you decided to go with Canonical's snap and it's proprietary backend, a non standard deployment tool that was forced on the community.

Do you avoid all containers because they weren't the standard way of deploying software for "decades" as well? (I know people that actually do do that though). And many of my issues about developers and vendoring, which I have mentioned in the other thread I linked earlier, apply to containers as well.

In fact, they also apply to snap as well, or even custom packages distributed by the developer. Arch packages are little more than shell scripts, Deb packages have pre/post hooks which run arbitrary bash or python code, rpm is similar. These "hooks" are almost always used for things like installing. It's hypocritical to be against curl | bash but be for solutions like any form of packages distributed by the developers themselves, because all of the issues and problems with curl | bash apply to any form of non-distro distributed packages — including snaps.

You are are willing to criticize bash for not immediately knowing what it does to your machine, and I recognize those problems, but guess what snap is doing under the hood to install software: A bash script. Did you read that bash script before installing the microk8s snap? Did you read the 10s of others in the repo's used for doing tertiary tasks that the snap installer also calls?

# Try to symlink /var/lib/calico so that the Calico CNI plugin picks up the mtu configuration.

The bash script used for installation doesn't seem to be sandboxed, either, and it runs as root. I struggle to see any difference between this and a generic bash script used to install software.

Although, almost all package managers have commonly used pre/during/post install hooks, except for Nix/Guix, so it's not really a valid criticism to put say, Deb on a pedestal, while dogging on other package managers for using arbitrary bash (also python gets used) hooks.

But back on topic, in addition to this, you can't even verify that the bash script in the repo is the one you're getting. Because the snap backend is proprietary. Snap is literally a bash installer, but worse in every way.

Except k3s does not provide a deb, a flatpak, or a rpm.

I consider it a lesser evil to use curl | bash once to install Nix and then get the latest version of packages like rustup and deno than to use curl | bash twice or more to install software on their own (in addition to my opposition to developers installing software on users machines).

And again, cycling all the way back around to what I said in the earlier comments, you still have not provided an example of bash scripts you would like packaged that do stuff other than installing software. You talk about wanting a general repo of scripts, and I have also expressed my concerns about that, and the problems with losing it's portability when you need an extra tool instead of bash and curl/wget.

We are just rehashing the same points.

Canonical's snap use a proprietary backend, and comes at a risk of vendor lock in to their ecosystem.

The bash installer is fully open source.

You can make the bad decision of locking yourself into a closed ecosystem, but many sensible people recognize that snap is "of the devil" for a good reason.

I've tried snap, juju, and Canonical's suite. They were uniquely frustrating and I'm not interested in interacting with them again.

The future of installing system components like k3s on generic distros is probably systemd sysexts, which are extension images that can be overlayed onto a base system. It's designed for immutable distros, but it can be used on any standard enough distro.

There is a k3s sysext, but it's still in the "bakery". Plus sysext isn't in stable release distros anyways.

Until it's out and stable, I'll stick to the one time bash script to install Suse k3s.

I find this comparison unfair becuase k3s is a much more batteries included distro than the others, coming with an ingress controller (traefik) and a few other services not in talos or k0s.

But I do think Talos will end up the lighest overall because Talos is not just a k8s distro, but also a extremely stripped down linux distro. They don’t use systemd to start k8s, they have their own tiny init system.

It should be noted that Sidero Labs is the creator of Talos Linux, which another commenter pointed out.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_is_the_best

I find this comparison unfair becuase k3s is a much more batteries included distro than the others, coming with an ingress controller (traefik) and a few other services not in talos or k0s.

But I do think Talos will end up the lighest overall because Talos is not just a k8s distro, but also a extremely stripped down linux distro. They don't use systemd to start k8s, they have their own tiny init system.

It should be noted that Sidero Labs is the creator of Talos Linux.

Apologies for the second comment, but I do want to clarify that I find curl | bash okay when they are used to install a package manager or platform that can install more software. (in more than one programming language, though).

I find that acceptable because:

1. Such installation methods are made by the package maintainers who maintain the "distro" of Nix, rather than developers.
2. The package managers (nix, brew, etc) can be used to install software that would otherwise be obtained with curl | bash.

There are very few software of these exceptions, however.

dev can keep using bash

I don't want "devs to keep using bash". My security problems are with the developer distributions of these softwares themselves, rather than bash. Even if developers offered a rust binary as an installer (or a setup.exe), I would still be miffed and disappointed with them for doing things like vendoring CVE's into their software!

Simply having this discussion brings attention to the issue, and to alternatives for getting packages onto the users machine, thereby increasing their security. There's a reason why it's a hot topic whenever it's brought up.

I think that distributing general software via curl | sh is pretty bad for all the reasons that curl sh is bad and frustrating.

But I do make an exception for "platforms" and package managers. The question I ask myself is: "Does this software enable me to install more software from a variety of programming languages?"

If the answer to that question is yes, which is is for k3s, then I think it's an acceptable exception. curl | sh is okay for bootstrapping things like Nix on non Nix systems, because then you get a package manager to install various versions of tools that would normally try to get you to install themselves with curl | bash but then you can use Nix instead.

K3s is pretty similar, because Kubernetes is a whole platform, with it's own package manager (helm), and applications you can install. It's especially difficult to get the latest versions of Kubernetes on stable release distros, as they don't package it at all, so getting it from the developers is kinda the only way to get it installed.

Relevant discussion on another thread: https://programming.dev/post/33626778/18025432

One of my frustrations that I express in the linked discussion is that it's "developers" who are making bash scripts to install. But k3s is not just developers, it's made by Suse who has their own distro, OpenSuse, using OpenSuse tooling. It's "packagers" making k3s and it's install script, and that's another reason why I find it more acceptable.