Re: [Evolution] downloads page

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz redhat com>]

Is less than ideal, it means a lot of trouble for application
developers:

a) If you write an app, you have to either learn how to package your app
for every distro or convince them to package and maintain the package
for you. In practice it means months before your app can hit the users.
Compare that to Mac, Windows, Android or iOS, where application
developers can go live and distribute their apps in day 1.

b) You can't install parallel versions of your app, for example, if I
want a newer version of firefox I have to uninstall the older version.
This means that power users have no access to beta versions and
therefore _everybody_ hits more bugs on release time.

c) You need to upgrade your whole system to update a single app, to
access newer versions of your apps, you need a newer version of your
OS... which is a ridiculous requirement if all that you want is to get
rid of a bug or access to a new feature in a single app like LibreOffice
or evolution.

d) A package is by definition a part of your system, how on earth is
making end user apps a part of your operating system an ideal situation?
RPMs have pre/post remove hooks with root privileges, a broken package
can mess up your whole system. This means that every application
developer/packager needs to suddenly become a system integrator with all
the responsibilities and knowledge that comes with it.

e) This situation actively prevents any closed source app from being a
well integrated app in the Linux ecosystem, which is bad for everyone
that cares about free software/open source as it restrains the size of
our potential user base.

In any case, if you think that the current situation is ideal for you,
then I am happy for you, you're just not the kind of person that suffers
from all the issues stated above; but the fact that it does work for you
doesn't mean that it is ideal for everybody.

On Tue, 2013-08-27 at 14:51 +0200, Peter von Kaehne wrote:
> > Von: "Alberto Ruiz" <aruiz redhat com>
>
> > In the meantime, even if less than ideal, we have to cope with the fact
> > that it's distros who distribute Evolution.
>
> That actually _is_ the ideal way. 
>
> Someone writes a nice programme. Someone else packages it for their distribution A and again somebody else 
> for distribution B. 
>
> Instead of running around the internet and chasing multiple download pages you do a simple central update 
> with the for your distribution typical tools to get a new version.
>
> Occasionally a distribution will hang behind, occasionally a distribution will ignore a new release and 
> very occasionally a distribution will make a conscious choice of not implementing an update. A user can 
> then either choose to live with these facts, change distribution or (if they are technically able) create 
> their own updated version from sources. 
>
> My current main laptop has 2500 programme packages installed. I would think this is fairly norm. For the 
> vast majority (2498 packages to be exact) I am not in the slightest interested to have the most bang up to 
> date version. For the two remaining ones - I am a contributing developer, so I compile them from source.  
>
> Unless you produce something very special or something in closed source, you would be a fool to replicate 
> half heartedly and half arsedly the often considerably well thought through infrastructure of a major  
> distribution.
>
> And unless you are desperately waiting for a brand new feature/bug fix from a specific package there is no 
> reason whatsoever not to wait for your own distribution to update itself. Which it will do at some point. 
> Painlessly and unnoticably, usually.
>
> Peter

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz