Run rustup

[andychu]

https://rustup.rs/

It looks like everyone gets their Rust toolchain this way and it has a bunch of shell.

Might be interesting to trace what it's doing as well.

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I'd be interested to know if any part of it runs and if not, what the error message is!

[jyn514]

Just tried this out with 0.7pre11, rustup works great :)

[andychu]

Thanks for trying it! After inspecting it, it does look like 435 lines of reasonable bash.

One thing I think would be cool is to run a lot of these curl | sh installers under a special OSH trace mode... and publish the results to see what they are doing.

You can sort of do it with curl | sh -x but it's not that friendly.

[jyn514]

What would you have instead of sh -x? At the end of the day shells run lot of code, I'm not sure there's a way to make that prettier...

[andychu]

I'd say I have two "levels of ambition"

1. At the very least sh -x should print the commands in an unambiguous format that you can parse. It's related to QSN serialization format: parser, printer, builtin #582 which I can explain a bit more if interested.

A really simple query would be like: "what are all the external tools this runs" (as opposed to builtins). I feel like you should be able to postprocess the sh -x output to answer that. And it's mildly interesting from a security POV.

"What are all the files it opens" is a related question which is a bit harder to answer.

2. It would be nice to provide some other scripts to make a big report from a trace. Maybe something like:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_boot_perf&num=2

I'm not sure how interesting it would be for curl | sh installers. But I definitely have big shell scripts for builds and data pipelines that start hundreds of processes.

Oil already have some extra debugging features that I'd like to document and expose, like --debug-file and so forth.

[andychu]

I think a lot of people are doing this kind of stuff with kernel tracing and eBPF these days. The kernel is in a better position to trace processes, since it has to start thema ll. But that's Linux only... and maybe we can do some similar stuff in user space. It's mostly an idle thought...

I think the first step is to make a better interface than $PS4 for the trace prefix string.

That's analogous to #498, which is to do something better than $PS1 for the prompt.

[jyn514]

I think this can be closed in favor of #583.

[andychu]

Yup makes sense