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Comment by aigarius | Hacker News Reader

Nice announcement, but where is the actual source? The github repo "build instructions" currently tell you to run a script that downloads a binary release from CloudFront, unpacks that and runs whatever was in in it. Sorry, that is not source. Well, at least not complete source. Where is the source for the binaries that are being downloaded and build instructions for them?

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The source is at https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable

The binary from CloudFront looks to be a convenience to avoid building node-webkit. From the readme:

  Then we have to do some juggling (unless you fancy building node-webkit from source).

You can get the source for node-webkit and build it yourself[1] but it looks to be time consuming and requires a significant amount of disk space.

[1]: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/wiki/Building-node-...

i can attest to this. if you dont need to, please dont go down the path of building node-webkit.

Actually, its not so much node-webkit as chrome/webkit inside it. that took a few days to download correctly and then a few nights to build.

i did it when i was still on snow leopard and needed nw.

Thanks, that helps a bit. So the ltbin binary blob is actually just a renamed nw binary from https://s3.amazonaws.com/node-webkit/v0.8.4/node-webkit-v0.8... release. I was unable to find out where the libffmpegsumo.so binary came from (I know it is part of FFMpeg and also integrated into Chromium, but what exact version is compiled there and with what options? They differ a lot, even in the legal context). And then there is the whole plugins folder which contains more sources that are not in git for some reason.

There is no real point for LightTable to be providing some bunch of binaries. A pointer to node-webkit would be enough, they have binaries (and build instructions) on their github front page.

The reason plugins are not in the main git is that each of them has its own repo. Which begs the question - why are they copied from a release zip and not cloned from repos?

There are a few more funnies there: .gitignore does not ignore the binary files added by these scripts, if there is a new node-webkit and then LightTable release and you re-run the script, your local old node-webkit copy will overwrite the new copy you just downloaded :)

Someone needs some solid packaging help. Oh and node-webkit people need a LOT of very good packaging help. Their build process is so convoluted, it might actually spawn an extra-dimensional entity.

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