While Windows has it’s share of flaws, I can’t help but wonder if a system in which it’s noteworthy to have “precompiled and widely available binaries” (so the USER doesn’t have to compile the app before he uses it) isn’t just as wrong, only in different ways.
The thing many nix fans overlook is that most people just want to USE a computer, and one that’s good enough is, well, good enough. From that perspective, nix isn’t so much a tool as it is a toy: something from which people derive more entertainment than utility.
The precompiled note is because Pandoc is written in Haskell for ghc; the Haskell toolchain is far from being universally available (as, say, C toolchains using gcc are) and is somewhat immature on Mac and Windows. The Pandoc source is available, of course, but one may legitimately not wish to install everything necessary to compile the source oneself. (If Pandoc were written in C, then I might not bother specifying that there are trustworthy binaries available.) There’s a reason not everyone uses source-based distros like Gentoo or Arch.
While Windows has it’s share of flaws, I can’t help but wonder if a system in which it’s noteworthy to have “precompiled and widely available binaries” (so the USER doesn’t have to compile the app before he uses it) isn’t just as wrong, only in different ways.
The thing many nix fans overlook is that most people just want to USE a computer, and one that’s good enough is, well, good enough. From that perspective, nix isn’t so much a tool as it is a toy: something from which people derive more entertainment than utility.
The precompiled note is because Pandoc is written in Haskell for
ghc; the Haskell toolchain is far from being universally available (as, say, C toolchains usinggccare) and is somewhat immature on Mac and Windows. The Pandoc source is available, of course, but one may legitimately not wish to install everything necessary to compile the source oneself. (If Pandoc were written in C, then I might not bother specifying that there are trustworthy binaries available.) There’s a reason not everyone uses source-based distros like Gentoo or Arch.