FOSS Developers: Make Your Products Easy to Build

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(FOSS: Free Open Source Software)

I recently started to use Eclipse Color Themes at my home desktop. ECT is an Eclipse plugin which allows you to, well, easily choose and manage color themes (which is a feature that Eclipse strangely doesn’t offer). I downloaded it via the Eclipse Marketplace (everything is a market these days, isn’t it?) and it worked pretty smoothly. I wanted to use it at work as well, but I’m not able to use the online download options in Eclipse. I was looking for a way to get it offline, like some sort of installer, or just the zipped content of the plugin/feature directories to unzip directly into Eclipse, but it wasn’t an option.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://amir.rachum.com/blog/2012/05/27/foss-developers-make-your-products-easy-to-build/
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You know what, Amir? I think that we have something like an example of an impedance mismatch here. What do you consider easy? For instance, is this easy for you?

tar zxvf <disttarball>.tar.gz; cd <distdir>; ./configure && make && sudo make install

if it is then a vast world opens up to you. If you find the above to be arcane or difficult then you have some learning to do. I take exception to your statement that "If it’s not easily buildable, it’s essentially closed source." and I will tell you that Un*x is user friendly it is just very picky about who it's friends are.

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If it's such a short explanation, why not put this line in a readme under the root and be done with it?

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Most UN*X app distributions have such a file. It is usually named INSTALL.