That doesn't match my experience. Two decades ago everything was in constant flux and more unreliable, but nowadays it's rare to find broken builds. It's only difficult if you distribution puts headers and such in separate packages, or splits up stuff so much that it's hard to tell what you actually need. Can't remember the last time I had to intervene to compile a random GitHub project I wanted to try out. It just works.
Are you on Linux? I'm running a Mac, and I find broken builds for projects big and small all the time. I'd open issues for them but the number of times I get a "it works for me" and any of the myriad other types of shrug devs like to give tends to put me off.
Ah yes, that would probably explain your experience. OSX might be UNIX certified, but it differs in radical ways from classic UNIX, like file system hierarchy and installed libraries (how many have something like glib installed system wide?).
It's unfortunate (or is it?) but very much not surprising that a proprietary OS would be a second class citizen in an open source ecosystem, especially when dealing with more strongly libre minded free software people like you can expect in larger numbers for enthusiastic hobby projects.
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That doesn't match my experience. Two decades ago everything was in constant flux and more unreliable, but nowadays it's rare to find broken builds. It's only difficult if you distribution puts headers and such in separate packages, or splits up stuff so much that it's hard to tell what you actually need. Can't remember the last time I had to intervene to compile a random GitHub project I wanted to try out. It just works.
Are you on Linux? I'm running a Mac, and I find broken builds for projects big and small all the time. I'd open issues for them but the number of times I get a "it works for me" and any of the myriad other types of shrug devs like to give tends to put me off.
Ah yes, that would probably explain your experience. OSX might be UNIX certified, but it differs in radical ways from classic UNIX, like file system hierarchy and installed libraries (how many have something like glib installed system wide?).
It's unfortunate (or is it?) but very much not surprising that a proprietary OS would be a second class citizen in an open source ecosystem, especially when dealing with more strongly libre minded free software people like you can expect in larger numbers for enthusiastic hobby projects.