The posts targets users not familiar with nix systems as well. Often times, it's not as simple as ./configure && make. There are dependencies that need to be satisfied and PATHs that need to be configured (depending on your distro). That was a huge headache for us when we first setup production servers on EC2.
I understand that it may seem silly to setup an EC2 account when the accustomed nix user can install Node much more easily, but hey, who doesn't like a year of free dedicated hosting thanks to Amazon?
The posts targets users not familiar with nix systems as well.
So the idea is to convince them to run servers connected directly to the Internet without any system administration skills? No wonder I get so much spam.
Somehow I think distributing binaries would be the logical solution to "node.js is hard to compile", not convincing people with no UNIX experience to pay Amazon $70 a month to let them run their very own server. But that's just me.
(I have personally compiled node from source on Debian and RHEL5. It was easy on both machines. The hardest part was to get waf to use all 32 cores on that RHEL machine for the build. But it's actually documented in the node docs!)
I understand that it may seem silly to setup an EC2 account when the accustomed nix user can install Node much more easily, but hey, who doesn't like a year of free dedicated hosting thanks to Amazon?