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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3475 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Just saying:

installing software dependencies to run it is very simple you can learn it in 15 minutes.

It depends on the environment but e.g. for the popular Javascript command line applications you need to install the Javascript virtual machine (NodeJs), it will install for you Npm, the node package manager which allow you to install dependencies.

You git clone a JS repository you find cool.

you run npm install

and to run the app it depends, could be npx run or npm run/serve, but that detail is described in the Readme file of the github repository see section how to install/run

For other programming languages, the steps are very similar and straigthforward.

installing software dependencies to run it is very simple you can learn it in 15 minutes.

I mean, you're not wrong, I've definitely done it several times. It's just that, more often than not I get some error or other that I find myself completely unable to resolve, and after a few hours of troubleshooting I give up. I guess you could say it's not the software dependencies that are the problem per se, it is my inability to troubleshoot them when they don't work the way I expect them to. And being as I make my living in other ways, it has never yet been worth my time to "get good" in this domain.

Usually things are trivial and just works, but not all technological ecosystems are equal, for example while javascript programs works fine, python programs often have dependencies issues (too old/out of sync). If the error message is a dependency version conflict yes, you can't solves them by yourself easily, often the thing to do in those cases is to look at the corresponding github issue or to open one. That way you can offload the troubleshooting on others or find out people have already shared a solution

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