Java – why do many projects only provide source code instead of downloaded jars?

I've seen a lot of projects, including resources provided by big companies such as elephant bird (twitter) and Akela (Mozilla), and ask you to compile instead of providing jars Is there any benefit to compiling in your own environment, rather than just downloading jars compiled by others?

Solution

>Dependencies are not in the same location, and even have the same version on each machine It is easier to detect their location at compile time. > If there is any native code in the project (sometimes only for optimization), you may need to set platform related flags at compile time