Timeline for Why don't some open source libraries provide binaries?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 17, 2011 at 22:16 | comment | added | Demian Brecht | @emddudley: The assumption is made that you're building the project on the machine that you'll be using it with. | |
| May 17, 2011 at 22:14 | comment | added | sourcenouveau | In response to this answer: I don't understand the performance claim. Performance optimizations at compile time tailored for my build machine are not useful... I want optimizations for my target platform, which I get through compiler options, not the actual machine I am using to run the compiler. So there's no performance benefit for me to compile the libraries myself over the library's authors. | |
| May 17, 2011 at 21:26 | comment | added | user8709 | @Demian - I know of at least one project where a Windows binary is contributed by a user, typically some time after a new release - complang.org/ragel - though there hasn't been a new release in a couple of years. | |
| May 17, 2011 at 19:37 | comment | added | phaylon | @Demian: That's what I mean. For that reason it makes sense to have stuff built by people that are actually using those platforms like mentioned in the question. | |
| May 17, 2011 at 19:15 | comment | added | Demian Brecht | @phaylon: Agreed, it seems like a good idea, but the bandwidth that would be required in order to build and test binaries on n platforms is beyond the resource capacity of most OS projects. | |
| May 17, 2011 at 19:11 | comment | added | phaylon | Thing is, many open source projects aren't "products" in the usual sense. Since open source is about allowing contributions in various forms, having other people provide binaries that know how to do it and have the time to maintain them seems like a good idea. | |
| May 17, 2011 at 19:11 | comment | added | Demian Brecht | @codeinchaos: That's entirely relative to the project (size). A build could be encompass a single binary, or several hundreds of MBs (if not more) in binaries and non-compiled assets (think games). Of course, sometimes nailing down dependencies can be a bit of a pain, but that's up to the author of the package to either provide a list, or a build-time mechanism of downloading/building dependencies (FreeBSD's ports collection is great for that). Projects directed at non-programmers will almost always have a binary/installer list maintained somewhere. | |
| May 17, 2011 at 19:05 | comment | added | CodesInChaos | A few binary files are usually not that big. And the time cost to the user is usually really large. Finding all dependencies and figuring out how to build that specific project takes quite a lot of time. Even if your user happens to be a programmer. If the user is no programmer he can pretty much forget about your product. And I think the performance argument is way overrated. Usually you don't need that last percent of performance, and if you do then you can still figure out how to build from source. | |
| May 17, 2011 at 18:57 | comment | added | Demian Brecht | @steve314: +1, all true points :) | |
| May 17, 2011 at 18:54 | comment | added | user8709 | +1 - but I doubt "always" (depends on what platform you're using), and those benefits can come at some cost to the user - needing a compiler, needing to know how to use it, needing to know how to build that specific project, needing to spend time investigating and reporting the wierd bugs that turn up only on your particular platform, etc. | |
| May 17, 2011 at 18:44 | history | answered | Demian Brecht | CC BY-SA 3.0 |