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I fail to see the problem. Just create a .tar.gz with all the dependencies installed and assets compiled, which you can distribute to users that don't care abou

I fail to see the problem. Just create a .tar.gz with all the dependencies installed and assets compiled, which you can distribute to users that don't care about or don't want to mess around with the build tools. If I want to build a native application (like git, which I often do) from source, it's not like the situation is much better. I have to install the compiler obviously, and I have to manually install the dependencies.

paulfurtado 11y ago
You usually don't have to manually install a compiler and all the dependencies. If you want to build a package from source which has already been packaged by the distribution, it's usually quite easy to do so. For example, in Arch Linux you can run yaourt -Sb git and it will get the PKGBUILD file for the package and allow you to edit it before building so you can build a newer version or alter build flags. When building a package this way, it will also fetch all of the packages it depends on in order to build and run. You generally don't have to think about dependencies at all. In Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora/CentOS it is several more commands, although there are probably scripts that do it in a single command. It's still a lot easier than manually hunting dependencies and figuring out how exactly to build a package.
- icebraining 11y ago
  In Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora/CentOS it is several more commands In Debian & derivatives it's just "apt-get build-dep git && apt-get source --build git".