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How To Turn Your Pile of Code Into an Open Source Project
Esther Schindler writes "You've written some code, you think it would be useful to the world, and you'd like to give back to the open source world. But how do you do it? Andy Lester provides a checksheet for developers for how to release an open source project and get it noticed. For instance: Before you release the project to the wild, write some documentation, create a mailing list, create an issue tracker, and so on. 'Users require releases of your software. It’s a disservice to your users to point at the Git repo and say “Just pull from the master branch and install it.” Users don’t want to have to use version control just to get a release of the code. Create a proper tarball (.tar.gz) that is easily downloadable by anyone. Announce each release. Your announcements should not assume that the reader is familiar with your project.' You think he's missing anything?"
Just releasing a .tar.gz is not enough for most users. To ease adoption of your "amazingProjectX" you really need to package it so someone can just yum install X || apt-get install X ect.
While I personally dont mind rpmbuild myself other tools exist like FPM (https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm). After that get it into a repo like fedora/epel/etc and your users will love you (maybe...)
Know any example of a Windows-compatible open source project that doesn't distribute binaries?
Almost all of the ones I have downloaded recently don't distribute binaries for Windows. Usually someone else forks the project and makes their own installer like http://rubyinstaller.org/ for example. Or, http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/downloads or http://strawberryperl.com/ or http://dwimperl.com/windows.html . The makers of popular languages like Perl and Ruby don't bother making installers. They just put up links to other people who do it. Some times other projects lag significantly behind the main project.
I'd love to do that, but getting a package into Debian is a nightmare that I have simply given up on. Even the simple guides are 50 pages long and a mass of not quite up-to-date information.
Ubuntu makes it trivial. Even if you can't or don't want to get into Ubuntu base, you can just make a PPA on Launchpad and get automatic building for all supported editions and archs of Ubuntu.
It can be very difficult. My scientific plotting package, veusz, was written using Python and Qt, so it should be easily portable. However setting up a sensible developer environment on Windows to compile the Python C extensions was a nightmare. Windows is pretty developer-hostile if you're used to Linux. Trying to find and install the correct version of Visual Studio Express was difficult. I had to learn far too many things about the registry, DLLs, building installers, etc. Mac OS X was rather more difficult, however. You have to download the massive Xcode and the non-standard way that Mac OS packages executables and libraries was very difficult to understand. It took a long time to get fat binaries working.
You do get a different class of user on Windows and Mac OS X, however. The Linux people are closer to being knowledgeable about development, whereas Windows and Mac OS people are primarily users, wanting more help and hand-holding.