when you find a project you'd like to clone and learn about but you cant even get their examples to build locally...

yes im looking at YOU every c based project on github.

Let me guess: dependencies? Lots of them? None of them documented?

@Fast-Nop pretty much, not to mention those that depend on deprecated deps or those that just assume your windows has a certain dll.

@sleek I remember I had something like that with srecord, a tool for doing stuff with hexfiles (widely used to encode binary firmware files as text).

They didn't have a Windows exe on their website, ridiculed Windows users, but had instructions for a Linux build. OK, firing up Cygwin. Tried to build. Failed dependencies, and really crazy ones. Installed them. Other failed dependencies, and compiler errors.

At that point, I said "fuck this shit" and just coded a tool of my own because that was faster AND actually worked.

@Fast-Nop I think github should add a feature where users can foag a repo as not working in a certain os, so if enough users flag it ud see a red tag saying "doesnt work"

@sleek Well that would be unfair to projects that are not meant cross-platform and clearly say so.