[dwohnitmok]

I'd be worried about perverse incentives. The company is now incentivized to make the build process more difficult, or at least not incentivized to try to make the build process easier for end users, which goes against the point of open source.

[tommyage]

> I'd be worried about perverse incentives. The company is now incentivized to make the build process more difficult, or at least not incentivized to try to make the build process easier for end users, which goes against the point of open source.

Open Source doesn't imply anything on the code. It assumes to benefit from a wide range of people (and outsiders views). Open Source projects, which would reject PRs on improving the build process will suffer contributions in the long run, risking their acceptance in the community. It should aid itself. At least this is the philosophy I proclaim myself :)

[dwohnitmok]

> Open Source doesn't imply anything on the code.

No, but if we imagine the incentive taken to the extreme, where you have an arcane build process that makes it essentially impossible for any person who's not on the original team to build the software, then the software devolves to effectively just a source-available project, since the users have no way of actually building their own versions, which also precludes being able to make any modifications even on their own forks.

I guess the major difference vs truly only source-available is that you can still copy and paste chunks of code to use in other projects?

[moron4hire]

I am struggling to think of any open source project of any size beyond small NPM packages that I've experienced that do not have an arcane build system. At least all of the ones I've encountered have been incredibly obtuse, to the point that I've mostly just given up. Anything Mozilla, Google, or Facebook writes. Actually, come to think of it, the only open source projects of non-trivial size I've ever been able to build without dedicating several weeks of time to have been from Microsoft.

[badsectoracula]

I've built a bunch of software from source myself and pretty much all of it is

    ./configure [options]
    make
    make install

...or the closest equivalent (e.g. some use meson or cmake).

[dwohnitmok]

To be fair, these steps can go wrong when the project doesn't make clear that there are a lot of implicit dependencies for the configure step to even work (and then make can sometimes break if those implicit dependencies aren't the expected version).

But to your point, there are a lot of projects for which those steps work just fine.

[badsectoracula]

Sure and in fact it did happen with one of the software i was trying to build, but the (first) error is usually along the lines of "cannot open include file foobarlib.h" - so i can search for that library (and many package managers let you search for the header files directly) or "this struct doesn't have that field" (common with -IIRC- libjpeg that at some point made some structs opaque). The latter is a bit more work (fixing the code) but it is also very rare.

[ModernMech]

Indeed which is why I like rust so much. The best thing they did was to make every program statically linked, so the build process succeeds 99% of the time. The only time I’ve had it fail for me really is when a project depends on OpenSSL and I don’t have it configured to it’s liking. Those time bring me back to the “make” days when I’d have to spend an afternoon installing some tool with all its dependencies, and even then sometimes I’d sometimes give up in frustration.

[dwohnitmok]

If I think about the software that I use on a regular basis that I've built from scratch at least once, quite a few of them are fairly straightforward and basically just the two lines I indicated. Just off the top of my head all of these were just those two lines (download build tool then run the install step):

1. Kubernetes

2. git-annex

3. The new generation of replacements for various core command tools (e.g. ripgrep, fd, etc.)

EDIT:

> several weeks of time

Out of curiosity, what projects were those that took several weeks? My presumption is probably very GUI heavy ones?

[umanwizard]

I don’t know about weeks, but I remember LibreOffice, Firefox, and Clang all having their own ad hoc build systems requiring some amount of custom configuration.

Debezium is also very Byzantine, or maybe it’s just that I don’t understand maven.

[ramses0]

apt source hello

apt build-dep hello

dpkg-buildpackage ...

https://wiki.debian.org/BuildingTutorial#Building_the_source...

https://ostechnix.com/how-to-build-debian-packages-from-sour...

https://buildd.debian.org/

https://buildd.debian.org/stats/

...all hail distribution package maintainers!

There's a little more to it (deb-src into /etc/apt/sources.list), but it's super-instructive to do it on something like 'busybox' and be able to make legitimate changes to something like 'ls' ... or do it to 'coreutils' and make modifications to the "real ls".

Although the "speed-bump" to being able to build packages for the first time is a bit rough, the benefit is that the documentation is outstanding and the process is pretty seamless for most/all packages, regardless of complexity.

The docs and tools are written by engineers and maintainers for people just like you... an independent consumer/programmer, sitting at their computer, trying to (re-) build a package to add a feature or fix a bug.

The other benefit is that the process is relatively consistent across literally thousands of packages and there's a lot of docs + tools +features to handle almost any scenario that Debian (Ubuntu) supports. If you learn it for one use case, your investment pays dividends across all other packaged software.

[moron4hire]

Have you tried building any open source projects? It's not exactly a good landscape to begin with.

[dwohnitmok]

It depends on the ecosystem (especially for tools without GUIs, I've found it usually is just two lines at the terminal: one to install the build tool for a given ecosystem and then the other to run it), but sure there are plenty of open source projects which are difficult to build from scratch. However, for most of them this is an acknowledged shortcoming that they try to fix when given the time and resources. It might be a much different world if there was a financial incentive to magnify that shortcoming.