Re: [Gimp-developer] xdg-app; was: WGO Transition Meeting

[Jehan Pagès <jehan marmottard gmail com>]

Hi,

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 9:17 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine
<alexandre prokoudine gmail com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Sam Gleske wrote:
>
> > I'd rather dpkg -i or rpm -i to install a package than use a 3rd party
> > app.  For Windows/Mac platforms I'd say it's useful but for Linux I don't
> > have much of a use for it.  I had proposed a 3rd party platform to be

We barely have enough developers, and can't maintain packages for
every distributions out there. This is not even 1 deb for every Debian
derivatives and 1 RPM for every RPM-based distribs, since they
regularly have differences which may break a package. So a deb for
Debian may not work for Ubuntu or Mint. A RPM for Fedora may not work
for Suse or Mageia… And so on. We will need to test these packages
extensively for every distrib out there, and make separate package if
something breaks. We just don't have the manpower for this. Even the
biggest teams of software can't follow up with every distribution out
there.

As for third party packagers, they are welcome to contribute upstream,
and become part of the GIMP team. We'd be happy to provide an official
RPM or DEB package for this or that distribution, built under a
controlled and secure environment with their scripts. But for a reason
I still don't understand, many third-party packagers like to work
alone.

> > distro-independent in the past (Steam) but there wasn't much interest
> > around supporting that.

I'm not sure if we have an official opinion about Steam, but my
personal opinion (which I have already stated on this mailing list, I
think), is that if I don't care personnally about Steam, but if
someone interested wish to package it for Steam and work with upstream
(i.e. us), I am absolutely not against. If a third party packager
makes the scripts to create such a package and contribute these, I'd
be OK to include this as an official release. Why not.

Now should it be our finale solution for Linux distributions?
Absolutely not! If we have to settle for a common package system for
all Linux distributions, it should be a Libre desktop standard, not a
proprietary packaging system managed by a single commercial entity.

> Sam, I think I'm missing something. What's really needed is a static
> build of up-to-date version of GIMP. That's all.

I think you are missing much more!
First of all, as Mitch explains in another email, such a build in a
tarball doesn't have to be static. You reference the Blender build:
well it is not statically built for instance. It bundles a bunch of
libs and requires and external glibc (assuming most distribution will
have it installed).

But what you are even more missing is that there is absolutely no
desktop integration when doing so (unless you know yourself Linux
desktop specifications, thus tediously create and place various files
in locale directories yourself). I want to be able to search GIMP from
the application menu/overview, I want GIMP to be automatically the
default app for XCF files and an alternative app for all supported
image formats (= have it proposed in the "Open with Other Application"
context menu) and having the possibility to make it the default app
for other formats if needed, I want the Wilber icon to be shown for
GIMP, I want to be able to easily and cleanly uninstall the software
(in a centralized place which list all installed applications, i.e.
package management, not by searching and deleting repositories which
can be anywhere), and so on.
All this is not made possible by your tarball. Really I have waited
for a long time to have something like this under Linux. xdg-app looks
like it could be the solution; or at least such integration seems to
be part of the main focus. I know there were other attempts (like
0install, etc.), but I'm not sure if any other would take desktop
integration into account. Or else they just didn't make themselves
known enough. It's possible there is a great system out there which
nobody knows; life is unfair, but in the end, we need a system which
every distribution will want to have installed as a default.

> It doesn't have to be RPM, and it doesn't have to be DEB. It doesn't
> even have to be installable. A simple static build inside a tarball,
> provided by download.gimp.org, will work just fine. Thousands and
> thousands of Blender users will confirm.

Well that's the exact right example. Nothing is more terrible than an
installation of Blender in a directory (that people will usually put
on their desktop, often even stacking several versions). That's not
their fault, there are no other good alternative right now in the
Linux world to provide an upstream build for all distributions. I do
install Blender this way too to have latest versions, and I hate it. I
want a real integrated installation of the last versions of a
software.
Others do this. Mozilla Firefox for instance, last I checked.

Jehan

> Alex