Dex

Big hearted fluffdragon...

...fictional ex-90s platformer mascot, nerd, plural, Ī˜Ī”.


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Codarobo
@Codarobo

Git Hub is not a place to download software for any purpose other than to use for further development of other software. It just isn’t, isn’t supposed to be, and shouldn’t be that. If software you need is on github, and it’s not directed at developers, then the person who created that software fucked up, not GitHub. It Is Not A Download Site, that is occasionally a thing you CAN do or might want to do, but it is truly not the focus of the site and never will be. That’s literally just -not what it is for-. Mostly stuff on github is there so it can be installed via command line tools/ssh/git. That is why it’s called ā€œgithubā€. It is not designed to be used by anybody who does not know what git is, because there are other sites for that.

Also, the reason why you don’t always find the same places to download stuff on every project is because that is literally up to the maintainer of the project. Some projects have releases; some don’t. Because you can upload works in progress to the site that aren’t in a releasable state, and some people never create releases, or compile the code for you. There are tons of reasons for that, like laziness or impracticality or maybe it just isn’t relevant to the page at hand. That is different for every single project.

GitHub is literally just source code hosting first, everything else is there because it is sometimes relevant to hosting source code.

(This has come up over and over every few months and seems to be a thing a lot of people think/talk about for some reason so i want to address it lol)


Dex
@Dex

the issue feels broadly similar to "JOIN OUR DISCORD FOR THE DOWNLOAD" (although Github is absolutely the lesser of two evils there) - people just don't want to maintain a website on top of the thing they're doing, even if that'd make it a lot easier to link to the latest releases page in a clear way

github might not be intended for this, but they sure do provide a lot of infrastructure to make it easier, and even a small github pages site is going to be too much of an additional overhead for some

(developers - if you're hosting stuff exclusively on github - and especially if it's meant for a non-developer audience to use, take 5 minutes, at least make sure your README.MD has a downloads or getting started section (near the top!) that either links to the releases page or details the download as zip button)


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in reply to @Codarobo's post:

There’s a reason the place I work made an open source tool that just generates a simple webpage with a ā€œdownload here!ā€ button for open source. GitHub is a lot of things but it’s definitely not for end users. It’s just that devs get releases ā€œfor freeā€ from GitHub and anything else takes effort.

You are absolutely correct, but I do think there is a point in this discussion worth bringing up about the disconnect between "developer end" and "user end". Yes, developer end tools are always going to be more complicated and technical than user end stuff, but developers get really used to that complexity and end up neglecting the end user because "well I understand how it all works! i don't know what even needs to be simplified/explained!"

while this isn't GitHub's problem to fix, it is a recurring issue especially in the FOSS community and i think the complaining about GitHub does kinda highlight a place where end users interact with developer tools and it ends up emphasizing that disconnect.

i mean, people can post until they're blue in the face about what github is Supposed to be for, but at the end of the day that doesn't change the fact that at least once a month something that i want or need to do on my computer requires me to get something off github. and as somebody who is not the site's target user type it is 50/50 on whether the process of getting the thing off of github is going to be an aggravating fucking nightmare that expects me to be a professional linux user. whether it's "supposed" to be a software download site is immaterial to the fact that that's what it gets used as, and end users are gonna keep complaining about it until either the site or the culture around it changes in some way

complaining at the people making the software you're downloading has a higher chance of being successful though

i mean you're even already on the website where you can tell them about problems

I think Coda addressed this pretty specifically:

If software you need is on github, and it’s not directed at developers, then the person who created that software fucked up, not GitHub.

Like, that is a real problem, but the site is never going to be the one to change because the people who use it are misusing it for that purpose.

Yeah, like, I know it's not a place where I, the software user, am supposed to be downloading things. That's the whole reason I'm complaining. When I complain, you'd think software devs would understand that I mean "I would like to not have to go here", but instead they treat me like an idiot. I KNOW I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE USING GITHUB THAT WAY, I SWEAR TO YOU, I KNOW AND I DON'T WANT TO