> I don't think sandstorm have really thought about this hard enough. I suspect we've spent far more time thinking about this than most people. We've heard eve

> I don't think sandstorm have really thought about this hard enough. I suspect we've spent far more time thinking about this than most people. We've heard every argument many times. The referenced blog post specifically addresses the security argument (hence the title) because that's the one we feel is most misleading. I absolutely agree that curl|bash is ugly compared to package managers, but there are some serious shortcomings of package managers too, and it's a trade-off. With deb or rpm, we are tied to the release schedules of the distros, which is unreasonably slow -- Sandstorm does a release every week whereas most distros don't release any more often than twice a year. We can perhaps convince people to add our own servers as an apt source or whatever, but now the MITM attack possibility is back. Yes, packages are signed, but you'd have to get the signing key from us, probably over HTTPS. No one wants to do the web of trust thing in our experience (I know because we actually offer this option, as described in the blog post, and sadly, almost no one takes it). The Sandstorm installer actually goes to great lengths to be portable and avoid creating a mess. It self-containerizes under /opt/sandstorm and doesn't touch anything else on your system. This actually means that Sandstorm is likely to work on every distro (given a new enough kernel, which the installer checks for). If we instead tried to fit into package managers, we'd need to maintain half a dozen different package formats and actually test that they install and work on a dozen distros -- it would get pretty hard to do that for every weekly release. (Incidentally, Sandstorm auto-updates, and it does check signatures when downloading updates.) So, yeah, it's pretty complicated, and we're constantly re-evaluating whether our current solution is really the best answer, but for now it seems like what we have is the best trade-off.