Re: promoting good gnome apps via news.gnome.org

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2009/6/19 Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>:
> I think this is a problem that will have to be solved with all the distros
> in a room. Unless we come up with a solution that is so elegant end-users
> just use it.
>
> Saying we shouldn't do an installer because each distro is different, is
> ignoring a user problem. apt-get and yum are beyond the average user that I
> think we are trying to target ... (If we ever want more than 10% market
> share, we can't count apt-get and yum as solutions. We also can't live in a
> world where you have to use multiple installers. Last time I installed
> something on Ubuntu, I used their installer and then got sent to synaptic.)

I totally agree with Stormy here, to what is worth, NetBeans has an
installer/unstaller and people seem really happy with this approach,
it gets installed on your home directory so it doesn't clashes with
anything else.

What we really need in the linux landscape is an .app like approach
for users for bundle applications. Developers have to waste loads of
time on learning the mechanics of every packaging system to deliver
their apps efficiently, and users can't get a decent app installation
experience.

I think package managers are really nice for the system
software/services, core components, the desktop, but for standalone
desktop apps is just a fail approach that doesn't benefit anyone
(except for the distros that avoid to make the effort/pain that it
gets to agree on a common format and a roadmap for migration mid/long
term).

Given that GNOME pretends to be a platform to create apps for our
desktop, I think this is a sensitive point and that it'll be for the
benefit of our developers and users to try to approach this issue.

> Stormy
>
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron sun com>
> wrote:
> > Dave:
> >
> > > I am against any Linux ISD (including ourselves) trying to provide a
> > > one-size-fits-all installer, until a packaging system that allows that comes
> > > along. I have high hopes for PackageKit, but in the meantime, your goal
> > > should not be to give people installers, but to document installing it on
> > > the most popular distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSe) with
> > > generic "apt-get" or "yum" instructions. Each distribution has a
> > > distribution specific installer, that is what we should be targeting.
> >
> > I have to say that I agree with you.  I know, for example, that Sun
> > Microsystems patches the upstream code in numerous ways to make the code
> > work on Solaris/OpenSolaris.  We work hard to get our patches upstream,
> > but there is usually a lag time and some modules are not well maintained
> > (we have patches in bugzilla for modules like libgnome and gnome-vfs
> > that have sat idle for years).
> >
> > Providing an installer that provides builds that are not provided by
> > distro are bound to not have such needed patches and modifications, be
> > hard to support, and will likely not work well or as users expect.
> >
> > Perhaps, instead of providing an installer, we could just point users
> > towards the correct resources to get the latest code from their distro
> > directly?  Or perhaps we could write a wrapper script that provides a
> > common interface for the various distro update systems?
> >
> > Brian
>
>
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-- 
Un saludo,
Alberto Ruiz