open source community or fund to build binaries?

November 11, 2024 7:04 PM

Is there an organization or community that focuses on building binaries for open source software?

I am usually pretty comfortable installing open source software, especially if there's good documentation, but for a lot of folks, it's just too difficult, so binaries are the only workable option for them. (And for me, too, sometimes it's quicker and easier to download a binary than to try assembling things on the command line.)

Is there a group or organization that focuses on building binaries of open source projects, to make these projects more accessible to more people?

If not, is there any organization that might be interested in developing a team to do this?

Thanks!

posted by kristi to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Create packages for your distribution of choice? Windows and Mac both have rapidly-maturing package manager ecosystems.
posted by sagc at 7:26 PM on November 11, 2024 [2 favorites]

Generally package management frameworks take care of binary distribution. Can you clarify where you see the need for this?
posted by so fucking future at 7:57 PM on November 11, 2024 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Downloading binaries that were compiled by some third party that is neither the original developer or some well known package distributor is a big security risk because there's no way to know if they inserted malware or something. These days almost every open source project I follow has windows binaries directly on their github somewhere, and for linux (including linux-on-windows with the subsystem) the major distributions compile basically everything for you. So I'm not really sure there is any demand for a 3rd party compilation service these days.
posted by JZig at 8:34 PM on November 11, 2024 [8 favorites]

Response by poster: so fucking future (love your user name), this evening I was looking at Lute:

https://luteorg.github.io/lute-manual/install/install.html

and a thread about how difficult it was to install for some folks.
posted by kristi at 10:27 PM on November 11, 2024 [1 favorite]

I don't know if there's a Forge-type thing which puts open source tools into clickable installers like SourceForge used to. SourceForge libda burned trust by packaging trackers and malware. We trust package managers, maybe there's a need for a GUI interface for Brew or Winget (the new Windows Package Manager taking over from Chocolatey), like you have for dpkg- and rpm-based packages.

Python is a bit tricky, there's used to be a spread of incompatible versions caused by string handling changes between v2 and v3. Pip is the installer and venv (virtual env) exists to handle the case where you have two or more tools that need incompstible version of the same library. If your package manager (brew or macports or apt/yum etc) can't provide you a system-managed package for a python library, use pip.
posted by k3ninho at 2:53 AM on November 12, 2024

Best answer: If you're talking about Python specifically, then I think k3ninho has it: making the process to use a package manager more user friendly on Windows and macOS would be a lot more effective than trying to compile and distribute binaries from Python projects.
posted by ssg at 5:31 AM on November 12, 2024 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Several projects I’m aware of have sponsors for binaries. If there’s a project that you think would benefit especially, contact the folks running it and see if they’d be open to sponsorship. Working with the people who know the project best is going to get the best results.
posted by Ookseer at 5:40 AM on November 12, 2024 [2 favorites]

The famous SMELLY NERDS reddit on github thread, for more context. And giggles.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:40 AM on November 12, 2024 [4 favorites]

Best answer: There's a bunch of projects that do this. At the OS level you have folks like Debian, Homebrew, and maybe NuGet or Chocolatey. At the programming language level the Python folks have PyPI, Ruby has RubyGems.. And then there's DockerHub and other container packaging systems. All of these are organizations that have a bunch of volunteers who build and package up software for installation.

Lute is on PyPI and also DockerHub. That's as much packaging as I would expect for an open source project like this. I read the thread you linked about install troubles and the primary complaint is "I don't know how to use Python on Windows". Fair enough, but that's a skill that's just assumed by the Lute install docs and a lot of open source projects. It is a barrier!

I think the specific solution for Lute on Windows would be a simple .exe or .msi installer that you double clicked and it installed its own copy of Python, Lute, and its dependencies. Traditionally the Lute project would need to do that themselves or a volunteer would. Another option would be a hosted version that someone runs on a server somewhere.
posted by Nelson at 7:34 AM on November 12, 2024 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: These are all great and helpful answers.

Thanks to all of you for sharing your thoughts!
posted by kristi at 9:59 PM on November 13, 2024