this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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What I'm hearing is you'd rather that the developer used their time to produce binaries so you don't need to spend your own time.
The problem with open source is that people expect a lot time and effort to go into things like bug fixes, documentation and support, when often the devs start out making something to scratch a personal itch. They then share it for the benefit of others, and it can be a slippery slope where you can end up with a second job, except you don't get paid or even thanked.
Open source burnout is a big problem.
I think the difference is the intent of who will use the program.
Is the intended user the developer themselves and that's about it but they're making it available for others? Then just having the code is fine. It should still be properly documented however. Devs forgot their own shit code all the time, the documentation is there for them as well when they forget or come back to a project years later.
However if the program is intended for use by people outside the developers, then a regularly updated compiled binary should be expected. They are likely already going to be compiling it for themselves, making that process produce an updated binary release in GitHub isn't too much to ask for something intended for others to use that the dev is already likely making anyway.
I see your point, but you likely also need to be compiling multiple versions for different architectures and OSes. If you offer an exe someone will turn up asking for a msi, etc, etc.
In theory, you can get this automated, but then you're requiring a dev to learn and maintain these tools instead of working on their project.
I do edit and spell check my posts because I believe that when posting something (text, software, etc) it's proper to make it easy to consume, without forcing dozens/hundreds/thousands of people to fix your errors. I would expect these things, but I don't demand these things, and I think it's inexcusably entitled for anyone to do so.
Who better to compile a binary than the person that wrote the code?
Yeah sure, I'll compile it in my OS. For any other OS, either I'm not knowledgeable about the tools available, and many of them that I am not going to spend money to acquire. If providing the binary a developer compiles for themselves would solve it, we'd not have that problem at all.
I specifically hate when program or libraries are only in compiled form, and then I get an error messages talking about an absolute path it has with some usernames I've never seen before, and no way to correct it as there's no code. Turns out when people pass compiled versions to the OS they don't use themselves they don't encounter the errors and think it works fine.