He's practically doing this:
- Guy goes to France
- Guy complains everyone in France is speaking in French
- Guy demands everyone start speaking in English so Guy can understand
Building and hosting artifacts for multiple platforms every time an update comes in isn’t trivial, nor is automating it. Most companies I’ve worked at that was an entire job.
On the other hand, most of my job is porting things and writing new build tools for them, so I also know build tools suck.
Also, more importantly, automating it means maintaining a server to do so, which doesn’t just cost time, it costs money. It doesn’t look like GitHub stores releases for longer than 90 days by default, so that may also cost money.
I’d say “fair enough”… if they owed end-users anything. Setting up builds/releases and hosting them takes time and resources. It’s the dev’s prerogative not to want to pay that price.
It’s like those people on Craigslist expecting you to deliver across town then getting pissed you don’t want to…
That's the root cause, actually.
Who pointed that guy to GitHub?
Didn't the one that point them to GitHub warn them that some technical skills are needed?
To be fair there are indeed some developers who just point everyone to their GitHub for releases. I was criticizing the insane expectation that devs have to build binaries and host them just because they made their code public.
Nobody has to do anything, really. The general attitude that if there’s no exe with a big green button to install, it’s an affront to the end user, and that they’re entitled to throw a hissy fit like the guy in this Reddit thread, is part of why we have a maintainer problem in open source.
The fuck are these bullshit ass replies? Github is for developers, not end-users? Then stop linking to fucking GitHub and distribute a goddamn installer on a personal website or Sourceforge or whatever the hell else you want.
It's not the end-user's fault that the entirety of the internet is built around twenty or so mega conglomerates and GitHub is being pushed as this massive software repository at the top of every search engine.
This is such a self-imposed L for developers and I wish they'd just stop.
Made something cool enough to share on GitHub? Probably warrants an installer/executable so stop being an arrogant dickhead about it and distribute it easily.
Well aware that not everything on GitHub is intended for avg Joe but of all the things I've had to compile myself, it could've been done.
Or you know, these developers don’t owe anyone anything and are already providing their work, for free, on the internet, to anyone. Building a release pipeline takes time too.
imo it depends whether the dev is really trying to widely distribute what they've made.
if they are, they should consider making setup as easy as possible for users with a good clear readme. Sometimes this won't be as simple as just making an exe, though.
This is free software. It has to be compiled according to the platform and architecture it’s installed on. Building and hosting regularly updated versions of executables of it cost time and money. The code of it meanwhile has a sufficient for anyone to build it.
How about stop being an entitled individual instead?
No one owes you a compiled binary. Unless you're employing them and/or supporting them maybe in Patreon or something.
As long as clear installation instructions are provided, that's the limit or the Dev's responsibility.
most projects on github aren't for users who don't know how to use a command line. an installer for sherlock would be useless because it's command line software and if you can't figure out how to use pip then you couldn't figure out how to use sherlock anyway
this would maybe be a different discussion if the software had a GUI but even then for 99% of them all you need to do is read the damn website and it'll probably tell you how to install it
That's honestly a boldfaced lie. I'm hardly a backend code user and a bunch of shit I download winds up coming from github. Now I'll relent that a fair amount of that is mods for stuff that doesn't necessarily need an installer but its definitely not just for coders nowadays
i'm not a backend developer either? if you can't run commands you can't use a command line tool. an installer would be useless here because pip /is/ the installer.
Fucking THIS. Github is for developers, yes, and it's also one of the least user-friendly websites in existence, but devs just keep linking to github instead of doing what you said -- even on places like Nexus, which will gladly host installers and executables. Fucking ridiculous.
Most of the things I and people I know have installed from GitHub aren't written in languages that can compile into executable files, so they kind of have to do it like that. A lot of projects that are written in languages that do support executables have one in the "releases" tab at the top.
The tool is a specialized tool, requiring technical know how. Likely not even being advertised anywhere. If you need that tool, you're expected to be able to follow the 3 steps required for installing this Python module.
I remember finding an app that claimed to be multiplatform, available on Linux, Windows, and MacOS!
Then I realized that the Github page had instructions for how to install the app on Linux, and how to COMPILE it on Windows and MacOS.
I did not get the app.
Then GitHub should not be a project’s main user-facing website, which is the point here.
Also, if your main user-facing website is telling users to set up an entire compilation environment in order to use your project, you’ve already failed big at UX.
