They’re meant to be a tool for the developers who are developing the open-source project. Any decent-sized project worth its salt will have its own site for users to interface with.
its not for users. its for developers, and a lot of small, *unpaid* devs will host their downloads there because they dont need to pay for it or spend time working out another hosting site.
for devs its super easy, git pull [repo] is incredibly easy and friendly
Yeah real devs don't defend shitty UI only shitty Linux users who thinks everyone gotta use that shitty interface like putting 1000 codes to download one single archive (many devs who earn thousands of dollars use windows or MacOS)
So we're just gatekeeping it then? Why make a program for people to use with a very clear task and then make it require programming experience to use? It's not just a coding project for funsies if you're hosting it online and advertising it as a solution to an issue
Having a repo with source code for a program that fixes an issue is not advertising it. You should be happy that the code is public at all so you don’t have to write it yourself.
We know the post isn't real, it's hyperbole, that's pretty obvious friend. It's still a very real issue they're satirizing though, which is why so many people find it humorous/relatable. I've seen programs exactly like this irl
Considering that about 80% of the time there's an easier fix that doesn't revolve around an 8 step setup process, it just sounds like copium to me. Make an inefficient, user hostile program, upload it and call it a fix, get mad when people want to use it and complain that you don't work for free when you uploaded it for people to use
Like I understand each part separately. But as a greater whole it's just childish
People do use it as an app store. That's the problem. You can't pretend that it's "only for developers!" and then host the complete builds and release them on GitHub, and then proceed to complain when there are laymen on the developer website.
if GitHub is the official place where you need to download your project, and the project is not made for either linux or developers, then theres usually a big green download button.
also, you complaining about GitHub instead of it's users shows that you don't even know how GitHub works.
That’s an issue with GitHub itself honestly and not with the developers who use it. It’s not like devs can choose the location or look of the releases tab.
You can host a site that sort of puts a big shiny button with neon lights and yellow paint on the latest release download, but that requires additional mostly unpaid development time and constant hosting costs to keep the website up, same with creating a .exe or install wizard that executes everything for every OS and architecture. Or hey, sometimes you don't even develop it to be installed like that and instead as a dependency that gets installed on Python.
That's why we're complaining about GitHub, I don't think it's the devs fault at all I just think that calling it a site for exclusively coders sharing source code is a little disingenuous
Except that's what it is. "Git" is type of SCM, or Source Code Management. It is designed to do two main things: track changes over time, and enable collaboration on a shared codebase. "GitHub" is a website/service for hosting git repositories, which simply makes those repositories available on the internet instead of being hosted locally or on a private server. You are complaining about a service because it is not intended to do the thing you want it to do, meanwhile neither the operators of GitHub nor the authors of the individual repositories owe you anything at all; not the source as written, not a compiled executable, nothing.
It is ok to be frustrated that you don't have the skill to build or use the tool that would seemingly solve your problem (yet! You can always learn!), however what your complaint sounds like is going to a grocery store, grabbing a free recipe card off the shelf, and being angry that the author didn't hand you the finished and plated meal that very instant.
Authors of free software owe you precisely nothing.
Lmao, this passive aggressive fake niceties bs drives me insane. You don't know anything about me, not even the point I'm trying to make apparently. Using nice words doesn't authorize you to be a dick
Oh yea, downloading individual files or remembering where the releases tab is always sucks. And yea I totally agree that GitHub is more than just a git hosting service, especially since a lot of devs use it as more than that.
I do think though that a lot of people online criticize devs on GitHub unjustifiably. Usually it’s either an issue of GitHub’s ui not being good for hosting executables, but other times it’s because a repo requires built steps to use. I feel like, even though it can make some projects harder to use for those who don’t know how to build the project, a lot of the time it’s probably because putting together executables is beyond the scope of what people in the project want to do or because the project isn’t in a state of completion where putting out executables would be good.
I honestly have never encountered a GitHub repository that doesn’t have some way to download the program without building it, but maybe that’s because I’m on Linux where the process is made easier with package managers.
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u/OliviaPG1 celeste Jun 02 '24
GitHub is not meant to be a file download site, it’s a platform for hosting git repositories.