I normally consider myself pretty handy with computers, but I’m no programmer. I know GitHub is primarily for programmers, but I often find GitHub pages when looking for specific programs, and always end up walking away frustrated because anything I try to download just gives me a whole bunch of unfamiliar file-names and what I’m guessing is some uncompiled data? I really don’t know, and it just confuses me what I’m supposed to do in order to actually execute files I find on GitHub? I’ve heard something about Python and something about Cmd (Is that Windows Command Line Prompt?) and whenever I look up tutorials or guides for GitHub I find primer videos for programmers, not user friendly newbie guides for people who just want to download a piece of software.
In: Technology
Github does have the option for the developer to upload finished Releases. Depending on how the developer manages things this may include ready compiled software or even packages ready to be installed. But in a lot of cases there is just a a compressed archive of the source code at the time. You can also get this by following the Download links that github gives you which will allow you to download the source code as it appears in the repository. Normally developer will not download directly but rather clone the repository which gives them a different package that includes a lot of the history of the project. Because projects are compiled and run differently it is common to include a text file with instructions on how to compile, install and run the software from source. Again this helps developers as they may want to make modifications to the source code before they run it. But in general github is not a tool for end users who should be looking in package repositories or elsewhere for easy to install versions of the software. And this is up to the developer and package maintainers to do. The only tool that github provides to help developers with this is to host files under the releases tab.
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