This is more than entitled behavior, it’s downright harmful.
When (not if, when) binaries get trojanned, this causes blame to be directed at the original author, and takes a lot of work to explain that they are not at fault - this has happened in many supposedly reputable download sites including SourceForge, TUCOwS, Download.com and many others (yes, I haven’t used windows in 20 years or so, no idea what the hip new places are)
Say “thank you”, and spend 10 more minutes yourself to set it up (even if compilation takes 5 hours, it’s usually 10 mins to get it started). And then offer it for others, and handle the ricochets when it gets trojanned with no wrong done by you.
If just 20 people adopted such a process, there would be 98% less complaints of this kind.
Trojaned installers by download.com were rampant back in the day. They would take your program and wrap it up in a nice little installer wizard and then also stuff a bunch of adware and spyware in there with it
I don't understand what's the harm of having a releases page with a binary and its md5 hash, or how that keeps anyone from just compiling an unofficial binary themselves and adding malware to it.
Anyone not technical enough to compile a binary has to give up trying to use it or risk some unnoficially distributed executable .
But not on the official page, right? And there's nothing stopping someone from doing that now is there? I don't see how the original authors providing binaries is less secure than anything else.
Sure, but what does that have to do with distributing binaries off Github? Maybe if Bonzie Buddy and IE6 make a comeback but I don't see that happening.
A checksum can be falsified as easily as a binary, and so can a signature. Only if you participate in a web or trust are you theoretically better off... but most people don't, so all such measures do is give a false sense of security.
When (not if, when) binaries get trojanned, this causes blame to be directed at the original author, and takes a lot of work to explain that they are not at fault - this has happened in many supposedly reputable download sites including SourceForge, TUCOwS, Download.com and many others (yes, I haven’t used windows in 20 years or so, no idea what the hip new places are)
Say “thank you”, and spend 10 more minutes yourself to set it up (even if compilation takes 5 hours, it’s usually 10 mins to get it started). And then offer it for others, and handle the ricochets when it gets trojanned with no wrong done by you.
If just 20 people adopted such a process, there would be 98% less complaints of this kind.