[StillBored]

Yes, and this is why we had to invent a new job position and hire a huge workforce of "devops". A cost that tends to far outweigh the license costs associated with most commercial software because those people have to have the skills of a full blown software engineer, to preform what should be a sysadmin job.

I think if 15 years ago during the opensource vs close source wars you had mentioned that opensource projects would eventually decide that they wouldn't make any attempt at documenting the product, no one would create actual installers, and continuous development methodologies would leave 99% of opensource projects in a state of 0 testing before releases, it would have been a lot harder sell.

Part of this goes back to the early linux RPM/DEB decisions to refuse to follow in the footsteps of more traditional software installers and provide an interactive UI for configuration (see bottom about HPUX). Resulting in chef/puppet/etc. This has removed the onus on projects to dedicate resources to that portion of the project. I've worked at a few companies shipping commercial software and there were always either a team responsible for building an installer, or a part of the development cycle dedicated to it. There were also frequently technical writers (a job position that seems to be mostly gone). Now, with opensource/git its done when the code gets pushed to github. Forget any documentation more complex than a few docbook/etc comments scattered around the code base and a wiki so fragmented that going from one page to another switches the version of the code in question.

Its a pretty sad/depressing state, and sometimes I wonder how anything works anymore. Thank god for RH, which actually has testing labs, people to fix bugs, and strong opensource ethics about making sure the upstream/other distro's benefit from their work. But, then they go and behave like poo flinging CADT https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html in other projects.

* See HPUX for a good example of how to do it on unix, without some of the problems windows installers frequently have. The packages have a standardized form description language that are picked up in a preinstall process, so the user can be prompted for install locations/configuration/etc before any of the packages are installed. The user runs though the entire dependent set of package forms before the install actually begins. Alternatively an ignite script (like kickstart/autoyast/etc only with most of the functionality of chef/puppet/etc) can be generated for automated deployments.