Rule 5: "Be Simple", is hiding a huge range of complexity, and I feel very underdoes this hugely complex issue.
I work on an C++ app, built with cmake with one dependency (boost). It still took me a day and a half to get it to build on Windows 8. I once spent two days trying to build a debian package before giving up.
Writing Scientific Software for distribution is a painful experience, with almost no gain for the developer unless you end up in the top 1% of 1% of programs.
I'm still going to do it, but let's not pretend it is easy, or a good idea.
Also, "Release Early, Release Often", and allowing users to identify problems in your code? I've found people, very reasonably, get very angry when they get wrong answers out of my program. We've had less than a handful of "wrong answer" bugs in releases, but that came from a huge testing undertaking.
I work on an C++ app, built with cmake with one dependency (boost). It still took me a day and a half to get it to build on Windows 8. I once spent two days trying to build a debian package before giving up.
Writing Scientific Software for distribution is a painful experience, with almost no gain for the developer unless you end up in the top 1% of 1% of programs.
I'm still going to do it, but let's not pretend it is easy, or a good idea.
Also, "Release Early, Release Often", and allowing users to identify problems in your code? I've found people, very reasonably, get very angry when they get wrong answers out of my program. We've had less than a handful of "wrong answer" bugs in releases, but that came from a huge testing undertaking.