tl;dr
Please save everyone some time and provide VM for your Open Source project, it takes far too long to build from source,
I’m tired of searching Google for weird error messages and dependencies that need building from source.
I’m not talking on just running the binaries, but about changing the source and rebuilding, which can be a lot easier that it is currently.
Hi,
I’m spending way too much time on building Open Source from source,
On one project I had to compile other needed projects from source, and had to switch Linux distribution, to get some newer packages, on top of understanding weird error messages, using forums and what not.
Just the other night I’ve build a very famous open-source project, it took ~5 hours, including several Google searches for errors and at last – manually fixing the Makefile after configure.
What I’m asking is this – you are the developers, you know how to compile your project better than anyone, and heck – it’s already running on your computers – can’t you just give it to me working on a VM?
You can also use a VM during development, it may save time, and maybe you already do use one, so could you provide it in a transferable way?
You want to know the real reason that more people don’t contribute to Open Source?
It’s that huge learning-curve of time and efforts for every single project when you desperately try to understand all kinds of errors during the first compilation attempt.
You really don’t give much motiviation for someone else to contribute to your project if she spends so much time just trying to run it from source – it’s a mental thing – first impression means a lot!
If you see nice GUI and then some bugs you may forgive, but the other order is tricky – if you first get lot’s of error messages and look all over forums for help – you may not want to wait for the GUI.
I don’t understand why I have to spend several hours building trivial little programs, and clear up several days for big ones. it’s wasted time I should put into fixing new bugs – not “fixing build features” that are encountered and fixed by every user trying to install.
No problem should ever have to be solved twice
Right?
So please save me, you and everybody some time, and provide a VM.
PS
* No ‘configure and make’ usually don’t make it work. (You can spend several years trying to make those better, and that’s fine by me, but in the meantime…)
The build problems on a new computer will probably be there regardless of your programming ingenuity – it’s not a trivial problem, and you can bet your new users have it too, just don’t let them tackle problems they don’t really have to – provide VM pretty please 🙂
* If there are problems of bandwidth, storage etc’ we could solve them together… servers and disc space are getting cheaper by the day. I’d rather spend several hours downloading (when I can do other things as well) than several hours debugging.
umjkh 