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Why does building something from Github have to be in a "secret" language and needlessly archaic with no real instructions?

Svenska said:
Including binaries (or any form of generated files) within a source repository risks forgetting to update them when the code changes and risks building a dependency to them which shouldn't exist. Both problems will cause trouble later, when things do not work as expected.
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Understandable. However thats just a lazy approach. With any major updates, re-release the files. I dont like to single people out but David Schmidt of ADTPro does this with every release. And he offers source and binaries. He caters to everyone.
 
VERAULT said:
The only point made that seems to make any plausible sense it @Eudimorphodon stating its made in a way to only allow contributors (same skill-set people) to further add to the project.
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Which is the point. This project is not intended as a novice build project, it's the engineering source files for a hardware product.

VERAULT said:
Understandable. However thats just a lazy approach. With any major updates, re-release the files. I dont like to single people out but David Schmidt of ADTPro does this with every release. And he offers source and binaries. He caters to everyone.
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You are comparing to a software project again. The whole point of ADTPro is it's "free software" in both the "open" and "free as in beer" sense; if David makes any money off it it's via donations or through the retail partner link he's got on the website.

What you're asking for is for a guy who's *really* interested in making some money off of hardware sales to carefully curate everything and provide step-by-step instructions so people who aren't capable of contributing technically to the project can skip paying him. (And heck, maybe run off their own copies to sell if they find that they're able to do it at a lower unit cost and make a profit; I mean, their overhead could certainly be lower since they're not wasting time developing the software or anything...)

I'm going to be blunt: it looks like it really sucks to be in the business of developing "open hardware" unless you are in fact happy to do it completely out of the goodness of your heart and watch other people actually make the money selling copies of it on eBay. There's been plenty of drama that's come out of this sort of thing (The "BlueSCSI" project is a good poster child for it... to be fair, I think their particular stance was pretty over the top, but there were kernels of truth buried in the mountain of turd that resulted) and considering there's almost *no* actual hardware in this video card dingus the barrier of entry for "leeches" is practically zero so, yeah, I mean, what are you going to do? Maybe cut them a little slack? Again, they've posted *everything*, all the code, the schematics, the GAL source, it's there if you *really* just want to make a copy instead of paying them in hopes of saving a few bucks, but that is *not* why they posed it.
 
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Fair enough. Maybe thats just it. Maybe I am blind to determining which projects are build friendly and which are not.
 
VERAULT said:
Yeah I am not really hearing a valid excuse for not including the complete files though. Why would you only make a piece of hardware that caters to programmers. Are these modern software types really under the impression that everyone (including hardware people) know as much about code as they do?

The only point made that seems to make any plausible sense it @Eudimorphodon stating its made in a way to only allow contributors (same skill-set people) to further add to the project.
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There seems to be a severe mis-understanding on your side on what GitHub actually is: It's intention is to provide a platform to share and collaborate. It's not a one-stop shop to provide anyone with free goodies. And as the guys are providing the stuff for free, in their free time, with their own money and with no intent to actually make any money, I really don't see why you seem to think that ranting over them here will improve anything.
 
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tofro said:
There seems to be a severe mis-understanding on your side on what GitHub actually is: It's intention is to provide a platform to share and collaborate. It's not a one-stop shop to provide anyone with free goodies. And as the guys are providing the stuff for free, in their free time, with their own money and with no intent to actually make any money, I really don't see why you seem to think that ranting over them here will improve anything.
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I am not ranting. There is no need for snarkiness. I already stated I am trying to understand the whole thing. Telling me I am ranting for asking questions to better understand the whole thing tells me your are one of those people whom gets asked a questions and your response is "What you dont know that?! I cant believe you dont know that!" Rather than being a decent human being and answering a question.
 
Probably many people are putting their work on GitHub just for their own convenience, such as to allow their friends to beta-test it -- not because they actually intend for anyone else in the general public to make use of it. Especially if it's a product that they go on to sell. "Sure, you could build your own for free, but I'm not going to go out of my way to make it easier for you to not pay me."
 
For me, the reason is that "I put in all this work for a one-off, which I will use only infrequently and is probably only of marginal use to others. Rather than have it disappear down the rabbit hole, why not document it and make it public?"

Given that fewer and fewer living souls know the difference between a 7 and a 9 track open-reel tape, it's a safe bet that you're speaking to a very small audience.

To make this relevant, what's the size of the target audience for an ISA QIC-02 tape controller? 5? 10?
 
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Isnt VI primarily for users who use Command line rather than the X environment?

I have used it. Its archaic at first but I suppose with regular use you could become proficient and pretty speedy with it.
 
Yes, it's more for command line users. Which I am. Not that I hate GUIs but I prefer command line most times as I have more control (or I feel I do). Some of the GUIs just get too convoluted cumbersome. I suppose it's all what one gets used to and when.
 
tradde said:
I have to say that's one I never heard of before. Is there anything special it does or makes easier?
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Joe's gag is it used by default keybindings similar to and otherwise kind of resembled using WordStar.

The first Linux I ever installed, a "mini-distribution" that fit on 7 floppies and ran on top of UMSDOS (IE, you unzipped it into a DOS partition instead of installing it in its own native partitions) used Joe as the default editor. I can't say I've used it much since then.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
The first Linux I ever installed, a "mini-distribution" that fit on 7 floppies and ran on top of UMSDOS (IE, you unzipped it into a DOS partition instead of installing it in its own native partitions) used Joe as the default editor. I can't say I've used it much since then.
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muLinux?
I used that, and also SmallLinux, and learned a lot from them.
 
Makefile said:
muLinux?
I used that, and also SmallLinux, and learned a lot from them.
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Monkey Linux.

It was an... interesting day, when I installed that. I'd only had the slightest exposure to UNIX-like operating systems before, but by the end of an eight-hour marathon session I was hacking custom XFree86 modelines to try to tweak a slightly higher resolution out of the shoddy 486 I was running it on because I discovered that Netscape insisted on rendering setting dialog boxes too large to fit in 640x480.(*)

(* Did you know that an NEC Multisync GS monitor will make an ominous growling noise if you push it more than a couple Khz higher than 31.5k? I learned that. I wonder in retrospect if I ended up giving myself a few X-rays before I achieved an 800x600 mode running at something like 49hz that was *kind of* stable.)
 
Joe comes in all sorts of flavors, all basically identical--for DOS, Win32, Linux (name your flavor) etc. I have it running on an OPi PC (ARM) via telnet on Armbian. My fingers know WS key bindings, which is useful. Joe has the basics--auto-indent, depending on language, colorizing based on content, etc. It's reasonably small and has a configuration file that can change Joe's behavior.

No frills; just works anywhere. When possible, I work in CLI mode anyway.
 
VERAULT said:
Isnt VI primarily for users who use Command line rather than the X environment?

I have used it. Its archaic at first but I suppose with regular use you could become proficient and pretty speedy with it.
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You can use vi in a terminal session in Xwindows easy enough.

Another moan feast by the looks;)










0)
 
VERAULT said:
However thats just a lazy approach. With any major updates, re-release the files.
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Not commiting binaries also prevents mistakes handling binaries. We are all humans and not everyone has the time to carefully curate each commit.
VERAULT said:
I dont like to single people out but David Schmidt of ADTPro does this with every release. And he offers source and binaries. He caters to everyone.
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Which probably means he either has enough time or gets paid for his time somehow (I don't know him or the project, so this is just an educated guess). Most projects on Github don't have the resources to be run professionally.

Rather the opposite: Most projects with real coverage (automated testing, commit verification pipelines etc) are either run by some organization or by people who work in such organizations and have the project knowledge. While I may have the technical knowledge to solve my problems, I definitely do not have the project management knowledge, which is a completely separate skill set. Which I have zero interest in learning.
 
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