Shipping binaries is a double-edged sword. On one hand it’s fast and simple, on the other hand you rely on the vendor to do it right. Confluent doesn’t ship binaries built on musl, Microsoft doesn’t ship binaries for arm64 (and has often failed to make it obvious, so the binary will install, but not work), nobody ships binaries for armv7.
Having this double world is a bit painful. Especially that once it’s shipped as a binary, the vendor doesn’t care very much about source distributions, so there’s missing instructions, bad documentation (like how to install on alpine, and that you need librdkafka of the same version as the python package for confluent-kafka), and just a whole world where a junior or even mid level developer will get lost.
I think that there needs to be more focus on delivering good source distributions, with everything included, since publishers don’t keep up with the variety of target platforms. And building from source is quite often fast, since machines are fast.
Shipping binaries is a double-edged sword. On one hand it’s fast and simple, on the other hand you rely on the vendor to do it right. Confluent doesn’t ship binaries built on musl, Microsoft doesn’t ship binaries for arm64 (and has often failed to make it obvious, so the binary will install, but not work), nobody ships binaries for armv7.
Having this double world is a bit painful. Especially that once it’s shipped as a binary, the vendor doesn’t care very much about source distributions, so there’s missing instructions, bad documentation (like how to install on alpine, and that you need librdkafka of the same version as the python package for confluent-kafka), and just a whole world where a junior or even mid level developer will get lost.
I think that there needs to be more focus on delivering good source distributions, with everything included, since publishers don’t keep up with the variety of target platforms. And building from source is quite often fast, since machines are fast.