Probably because of the list of dependencies. The Subversion team would
spend as much time supporting a binary version as developing - it's far
easier for them to hand out a list of dependencies and a good makefile.
You should try build from source - you can learn a lot from it. I'm not a
developer at all, and I know I have. It takes like 4 hours to setup and
build totally from scratch, and that's with absolutely no previous
knowledge. And if it broke, you'd have far more people willing to help you
out than you'll get by indignantly demanding binaries.
The team has probably spent more hours making sure the Subversion will
compile cleanly on Windows than they have on Solaris (my platform of
choice). No binaries probably because then you get requests for every
platform under the sun (no pun intended), "Why isn't AmigaOS supported
with binaries???" "My iPaq segfaults and I installed your binaries".
Honestly, the ability to understand how the tool is built is quite helpful
in understanding source code development itself. This isn't elitism at all
- you simply will understand the product and the requirements better. And
if you don't want to build (which is not totally unreasonable), someone
will eventually get the binaries out for you - you just have to wait a
bit.
I'd rather have the Subversion team fixing bugs than packaging
distributions.
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric J. Smith [mailto:eric@ericjsmith.net]
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 12:10 PM
To: users@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: RE: Subversion 1.2 RC1 Binaries
First of all, let me say that I think Subversion is awesome and I really
appreciate the efforts of everyone involved.
That being said, how ridiculous is it that a project as huge as Subversion
doesn't have official binaries? It seems pretty ridiculous to me. Even
without "official" binaries, it seems like a project this big would at
least have an unofficial repository where automated nightly builds and
releases are stored. Are there no corporate sponsors that would be
willing to provide a build server?
I'm not ungrateful for the efforts of everyone involved here, but I am
just pointing out what I think is a huge hole. I mean, how are we
supposed to help test these releases if there aren't any official
binaries?
Eric J. Smith
> I don't know if you noticed it (it's a bit buried, halfway down the
> page), but the following statement appears on the download page on the
> Subversion website:
>
> "The Subversion project does not officially endorse or maintain
> any binary packages of the Subversion software. However,
> volunteers have created binary packages for different
> distributions and platforms, and as a convenience, we maintain a
> list of links to them here."
>
> If the generous efforts of these volunteers doesn't meet your
> schedule, perhaps you should volunteer to prepare Subversion binaries
> for the Windows platform yourself?
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Received on Tue Apr 12 18:53:06 2005