No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
If binaries aren't pre-built, compiling it yourself is not particularly difficult (assuming it's a decent repo that's well-maintained).
Readme often has a list of dependencies and basic instructions. On linux, build steps might look something like
make && sudo make install, possibly with a./configurethrown in beforehand. You can, of course, runconfigurewhere present with a help flag to see all available options, and change them as you like, but many programs 'just work' with the default options on a variety of platforms.Before that, you have to install the dependencies. Often, it's a copy/paste command in the readme, and on Debian might look like
sudo apt install libsomething libsomethingelse libsomethingelse- the overwhelming majority of the time, that gives you the correct versions (may be part of package name)Otherwise, you can
makeseveral times, and if you read the errors, it will often tell you what's missing and you can iterate through the deps that way.I don't suggest building the dependencies initially. It might be necessary (If memory serves, you still need to drop the PCRE library source in a specific place for Nginx to find, for instance, but the build process also builds that). It's usually not necessary, and if you delve too far down it can be a frustrating experience.
I'm not in the habit of building for windows, as the only computer I run it on is my work computer, but there may be instructions for that in readme as well. If the dependency installs fail, you'll have to search your distro's package manager to find the correct name of the package on your distro, but once it's present you should be able to proceed from there without problems (in well-maintained projects)
If it doesn't build, you can always open an issue on the GitHub - there are no stupid questions, particularly if you search issues/closed issues first for keywords in the errors you see. The vast majority of projects are run by decent people who respond reasonably and/or some community member will jump in with an answer.
For some languages, the build steps look very different - Maven projects in Java come to mind. I don't love that tool, but it's less evil than some of the alternatives. OTOH, if it's rust, the build steps are very quick and painless - including installing Rust in the first place.