Porsche Monty
Member
Posts: 417
Registered: 06-10 |
For code-illiterate people like myself, there's little practical difference if any difference at all. What actually matters for me is how well the process is explained.
I ran into a few problems and dilemmas that I had to resolve on my own while downloading and setting up the cygwin environment.
Firstable, there's 2 downloading options (bin and src) , some times newer, stable versions of what you're supposed to download (which makes you wonder if you should really stick to the exact version suggested in the guide or go for the updated one instead) and on the top of that, software like "python" has a thousand different files that carry the same name, thus I wasted quite some time choosing the correct "python" just to eventually realize I had to switch back to "category" and grab the whole package...and at this point I'm not even sure if that was necessary.
Next I had to figure out where to place the script, and when you see your freshly compiled exes bloated up to several times the size of the official binary distributions, you wonder what the hell went wrong, even if they run ok.
Also it doesn't help that most of the projects I've managed to compile in the past didn't apply any kind of optimizations, even the safest ones, so I get that feeling of "does the programmer give a damn?" and how much of the available resources are being wasted for nothing.
In other words, be as detailed as you can possibly be and never make any assumptions on the amount of knowledge people who don't work in the programming field actually posses, because it's normally none, and the learning curve for even the most basic stuff can be a overwhelming to some.
I know spoonfeeding trivial stuff like this gets irritating and frustrating, and for that I apologize, but trust me, it's even more irritating and frustrating to be on the other side ;)
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10-30-11 07:09 
