There's an aspect of this frustrating, forced busy-work behavior that can get baked into software development, and it isn't going away anytime soon.
Technology innately gives rise to a behavior called yak shaving, and it's not limited to software development, but pretty much any form of technology-related behavior is prone to it, when layers upon layers of technology compound one another and accumulate their own accretion disks of cruft.
A very simple example is needing anti-freeze to drive a car. If there were no chemical companies producing millions of gallons of anti-freeze a year, and no auto-stores to distibute periphery car necessities, and gas stations, and auto mechanics didn't supply anti-freeze, because it's beyond the scope of their expertise, how would I produce the right anti-freeze for my car on my own? Well, what are the requirements for producing industrial grade ethylene glycol?
In order to accurately compare the two applications, how would you take advantage of the fact that these are open-source projects, and actually review the source code, and then build from source?
Each application is built upon many other independent software projects, each sub-project with it's own disciplines, specializations and dependencies. It's time consuming and painstaking behavior to dig into the source trees for these programs and all their dependencies.
Technology innately gives rise to a behavior called yak shaving, and it's not limited to software development, but pretty much any form of technology-related behavior is prone to it, when layers upon layers of technology compound one another and accumulate their own accretion disks of cruft.
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gs...
A very simple example is needing anti-freeze to drive a car. If there were no chemical companies producing millions of gallons of anti-freeze a year, and no auto-stores to distibute periphery car necessities, and gas stations, and auto mechanics didn't supply anti-freeze, because it's beyond the scope of their expertise, how would I produce the right anti-freeze for my car on my own? Well, what are the requirements for producing industrial grade ethylene glycol?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol
A similar open-source software example would be dependency hell.
Just compare the differences in dependencies between two very popular open-source web browsers:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/chromium-browser
http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/firefox
In order to accurately compare the two applications, how would you take advantage of the fact that these are open-source projects, and actually review the source code, and then build from source?
Each application is built upon many other independent software projects, each sub-project with it's own disciplines, specializations and dependencies. It's time consuming and painstaking behavior to dig into the source trees for these programs and all their dependencies.
How deep can you go before you give up?