Well, the downside is that now I can't be arsed to download/install it (not that it works on my platform). And the repository comes with a lot of build cruft instead of just some src files.
It's one command to download and install the snap. How is that more onerous than pulling in hundreds of packages from npm?
And having "build cruft" is a feature for most non web devs. It would be trivial to set up a separate repo with all the build tools and configuration, but we want it nearby.
> And the repository comes with a lot of build cruft instead of just some src files.
Genuine question: what development toolchain lets you make a repo _doesn't_ have a bunch of files for the build process? GP specifically mentioned JavaScript, which I feel has an above-average amount of tooling in projects due to preprocessing the code in various ways being super common.
And having "build cruft" is a feature for most non web devs. It would be trivial to set up a separate repo with all the build tools and configuration, but we want it nearby.
There's no tradeoffs here, IMO.