On 08/15/2015 01:08 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> Otherwise, have we improved anything? Ultimately, this methodology is a
> win for GNOME and to some extent a loss for distros. But it isn't
> completely so, as QA for distros will go substantially down as well as
> the number of bugs found. There can be more focus on hardware and
> distro engineering at that point which will overall bring quality higher.
Nobody said anything about "Branded Environments".
No, but I think that is the local conclusion. After all, each of these distros have their own distro making infrastructure so it will be natural for them to create such an environment.
The flip side is that GNOME is not at all equipped to distro engineer their own neutral environment. After all, who is going to file bugs against that image? Something we will need to think about.
The conflation of runtimes and distros is common. Fedora, openSuse,
Debian, and others would be free to implement the runtime however they
see fit. There is no need to "kill distros" to get the security and
distribution models we want from developer and user standpoints. It
does, however, allow for innovation here.
I am not interested in killing distros, at least that isn't the goal. The goal (one of them) is to be able to have a direct relationship with the people using your software and reduce the confusion around distributing apps.
GNOME, for example, would specify what a GNOME runtime means. (Same goes
FreeDesktop, KDE, and others). It could be a collection of libraries,
services, files, particular file locations, etc. Distributions are free
to implement the runtime using packages.
Sure, but now you have a lot of run time. There are two questions then that a developer will would like to know then - which is the right runtime, and which runtime will reach the maximal audience?
Just because we (GNOME in this case) will define what a runtime is
inside the xdg-app container, doesn't mean that is how it has to be
outside the container.
I don't understand?
GNOME can, of course, provide a reference implementation of the runtime.
And that would likely be provided via GNOME Continuous (which currently
builds using some Yocto components).
Right, so the apps that come with the GNOME desktops (e.g. GNOME music) will likely be QA'd under our reference implementation right? So if we assume that a distro will take our apps and then recreate them under their own xdg-app environment for QA, and then distribute under their own app store? That might be ok with us because we're a big project and we've created xdg-app and have already designed our runtime What will a developer do? Does that person submit their apps to each distro or do they just pull it from github or something and developers provide the information required to create a runtime?
I think there is a lot of details that we need to figure out when it comes to the developer story. It gets complicated if we let distros figure out what that is. So we really need to figure out the details, and then make sure we don't allow them to make up their own story because then each distro will come up with their own and then that becomes a mess.
sri
I fear that
-- Christian
