alt Hacker NewsAnything that suggests curl into bash just plain sketches me out. (edit: I know, this isn't totally rational, it just seems weird to me. We download and trust a lot of software and run code from a bunch of package repositories as a regular activity...).
Git clone llama.cpp and build it, it's not hard.
https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/docs/build...
literally just a few steps for the basics:
git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp
cmake -B build
cmake --build build --config Release
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>Anything that suggests curl into bash just plain sketches me out.
How is it different than trusting any other method of installation? If URL has https and is from an author you trust i dont see the difference.
There are also prebuilt binary archives for just about any distribution and inference backend for the latest github release:
https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/releases
No need to compile unless you really need to.
You can also install it through homebrew https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/llama.cpp
You're not wrong about the appearance of sketchiness of that, but.... dude, come on. "It's not hard" is only true because you already know how to do it.
> Anything that suggests curl into bash just plain sketches me out.
Yeah, 100% and it's becoming more and more of a thing, see rust install for example.
OTOH, if you're installing llama.cpp, you're more than likely planning to run an LLM on your Linux box with an agentic harness, so a curl into bash thing might be the least of your security concerns, :-)
it's also on the arch repos
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What would you win? Cmake is capable of executing shell commands and you end up with a binary that will execute on your machine anyway. At the end of the day it is just a matter of trust anyway, isn't it? I personally use bwrap if I'm not confident about the source.
Cloning a repo and building it is not _that_ hard, but easy installation is often the thing that makes or breaks a product. I believe Ollama proves that point in this context.
Absolutely, and it's even worse when you are asked to blindly download and run software like the Brave browser, which is open source but exclusively packaged and distributed by an adware company with a questionable history. The software itself is open source, but independent builds seem to be discouraged and no Linux distro packages Brave as a result. I built it myself in the past, but it takes close to two hours on a workstation and isn't worth the effort to keep it updated.