Recently a coworker asked me about my thoughts on "silent installations" and all I could think about was keyloggers, spyware, and other things that could show up installed on my computer unannounced. Hard pass.

His idea was service providers may want silent installations so users just get the software they need without being bothered.

Even installing at scale across multiple server nodes, I could see two paths: easy scriptable installs with a config file, something I could work with in a terminal or provide the software in a package manager (like Brew, for instance) that I can still script my way to the install. I'd want to be able to configure the install for my given setup, whether I'm installing this on my personal machine or on a server.

Am I missing something? Is the definition for "silent installations" broader than I've described it? What are your thoughts? Are you packaging your software this way?