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by mft_ 88 days ago
It's probably pertinent to mention that the Python installation ecosystem is a hot mess, with multiple ways of installing Python (e.g. standard Python installer, multiple different packages managers on different OSes, Conda, and myriad package managers which can also install Python. And of course, these can all be in different locations, and may have different approaches to installing libraries.

Which is to say, I don't blame the author for wanting a single installation that his app can manage and rely on, even though I wish it was different.

2 comments

The app is vibecoded. The author isn't making decisions about these tradeoffs and possibly wasn't aware of the implications of these decisions at all. The robot they used tried to fulfill its given prompts at the expense of everything else, which is why it's looking in bad directories and trying to install Docker environments in the build script.

I suspect that some of the author's comments in this thread are vibe-written, also. They are LLM-flavored and contrast strongly vs. their regular commenting.

> The app is vibecoded. The author isn't making decisions about these tradeoffs and possibly wasn't aware of the implications of these decisions at all. The

I agree, but to be fair this is how I would code it, too. I would have probably bundled the Python interpreter and only downloaded the FFmpeg binary (because of its license), but that's a relatively minor difference.

Do.. people not already have ffmpeg on their machines? In that case it should use the system package manager.
Not all people do. Also it may be a different version that doesn't support the command line arguments that you use, or it may not have been compiled with the flags that you want. It's just less headache to vendor it.
It's not open source if it has to download binaries from the internet to run.
I agree with the sentiment but that definition would make open source Windows programs not open source either.
Why? Apparently even the build scripts download stuff here…