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Even for an executable, the installation environment may be different from the execution environment (which may be sandboxed, mounted read-only, etc.). Moreover
by jedbrown 11y ago
Even for an executable, the installation environment may be different from the execution environment (which may be sandboxed, mounted read-only, etc.). Moreover, a tarball gives you a reliable manifest so that you know what will happen before installing. A shell script just does whatever it wants, making it potentially surprising/destructive and difficult to clean up.
- kazinator 11y agoTrue. "Run foo.run thing as root, so it can put stuff in /usr/bin, then switch to your regular account to use it". Oops! The thing is, that ship has largely sailed, with the proliferation of package management that prompts you for a password to go sudo. sudo apt-get install whatever # trust your distro sudo ./foo.run # trust foo.run's publisher, a bit worse > * A shell script just does whatever it wants, making it potentially surprising/destructive and difficult to clean up.* Just like Windows installers---which is why we need utilities like Revo Uninstaller. This lets us run the application's uninstaller first, then scan the entire filesystem and registry for what looks like bits and pieces that might belong to that program, and let the user select which of them to blow off. I use it quite a bit.