There&#x27;s a long history of distributing source code already partially processed, and for decades, this has been what people expected when they download a source tarball. Newer generations were introduced to open source through github and are less familiar with this, but they also are rarely interested in source tarballs — they&#x27;re interested in either the source code to contribute to (in which case they&#x27;ll git clone) or in a binary distribution.<p>Really the main purpose of source distributions is for <i>packagers</i>. Especially when you&#x27;re creating pkgbuild scripts like for archlinux&#x27;s AUR or gentoo or slackbuilds or macports or BSD, all the tools needed to build the source code become build-time dependencies for your package, which is annoying for people installing it.