No more updates for Freecode [LWN.net]

No more updates for Freecode

Posted Jun 29, 2014 15:02 UTC (Sun) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: No more updates for Freecode by khim
Parent article: No more updates for Freecode

> There is. The lack of stable ABI turn the whole thing into excercise in frustration. I've already showed an example: try to install TeamViewer's .deb on recent version of Ubuntu. It just does not work. And it's not upstream's fault: all the pre-requisites are there yet you could not do that because distrubtion creators broke the only ABI they actually control.

You're going to need a better example. I downloaded the first deb on that page and it worked fine. It required a whole bunch of packages which I installed, but it turns out it doesn't actually need them because it's a static binary.

Now, the second non-multiarch version is indeed broken. Multiarch has been standard for years now, so backward compatibility has indeed been removed. But given the first package works everywhere they should just delete the second one.

But really, I don't see it as a distribution's responsibility to deal with the fact that many libraries don't provide binary backward compatibility. You seem to consider it a distribution's job to make it easy for users to install third party software. As long as the *users* of the distribution don't care, neither will they. And I at least don't care.

> Even applications which were born on Linux (e.g. GIMP) stopped doing that. [distributing directly]

Right, because no-one was interested anyway. Why would I want to download from the GIMP site when I can just use the GIMP PPA[1] and apt-get install?

[1] https://launchpad.net/~otto-kesselgulasch/+archive/gimp

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No more updates for Freecode

Posted Jun 29, 2014 15:19 UTC (Sun) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]

And unless you're an enthusiast, you don't need to add a repo/PPA, you use the base system version happily. Who cares when you can upgrade OS in 6 months or 1 years time, when it suits you?

I'm sure everyone who has developed for other people, have had experience of finishing a feature, and because of 80-20 rule, found a "so what!" reaction from users who just don't get it at least initially, or less pleasantly if you dare break compatability and they notice the change done to enable future use cases other than theirs.

No more updates for Freecode

Posted Jun 29, 2014 15:41 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

You seem to consider it a distribution's job to make it easy for users to install third party software.

Of course. That's what an OS is supposed to do. The main function of general-purpose OS to provide support for wide variety of programs. There are OSes which do that well (Windows, Android), the ones which do that not so well (MacOS, iOS) and ones which are absolutely awful (classic Linux distributions fall into that category).

And, surprise, surprise, number of users correlate pretty well with willingness to support developers. Think about it.

P.S. On server situation is different. Linux is king there. Not because it's better in support department (it's as awful as on desktop, actually), but because it's cheaper. When you have one sysadmin and hundreds (or thousands) servers price for Windows (or MacOS which is also quite expensive if you'll recall price of hardware) then it makes sense to cope with all that craizness. On desktop it's just not an issue and Linux is non-contender.

No more updates for Freecode

Posted Jun 29, 2014 17:36 UTC (Sun) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

>> You seem to consider it a distribution's job to make it easy for users to install third party software.

> Of course. That's what an OS is supposed to do. The main function of general-purpose OS to provide support for wide variety of programs.

Yes, and the OS (Linux) does indeed support a wide variety of programs. I think you meant to say "proprietary programs"? We're talking about distributions, and in the Debian Social Contract it says "Our priorities are our users and free software". As long as the users are not clamoring for making it easy for proprietary developers, it's not going to happen. And rightly so. Debian does support a wide variety of free software and that's what the users want.

> There are OSes which do that well (Windows, Android), the ones which do that not so well (MacOS, iOS) and ones which are absolutely awful (classic Linux distributions fall into that category).

As long as each are meeting the needs of their respective users, what is the problem exactly?

No more updates for Freecode

Posted Jun 29, 2014 18:22 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Yes, and the OS (Linux) does indeed support a wide variety of programs.

No, it does not. You may joke about quality of Android applications but it does not change the fact that there are millions of them. And Windows has similar number of application and most likely even more. And that's not counting special-purpose applications developed “in-house” (some estimates say that there are 10 times more of these). Linux has just a tiny fraction of that.

I think you meant to say "proprietary programs"?

I meant to say “programs delivered in usable form”. Since for most users binaries are the only usable form that's what I'm talking about. If application is actually open sourced or not is minor issue here. Even if user actually has the source (as with many “in-house” applications) there may be noone around who could actually modify/fix it.

As long as the users are not clamoring for making it easy for proprietary developers, it's not going to happen.

Users often try to ask about it but when faced with openly hostily reaction just go with MacOS or Windows.

As long as each are meeting the needs of their respective users, what is the problem exactly?

The problem is that the whole thing slowly falls apart. Few years ago people were able to manage the complexity by throwing huge amount of resources on a problem, but now, when number of developers is shrinking (how many active developers GTK+ have now?) and complexity of the task does not Linux desktop becomes more and more broken. And people who are trying to do something about it (e.g. Lennart Poettering) are met with outright hostility.

It really starts to look like the only solution to the whole mess is replacement of GNU/Mess with something based on Android and I, for one, not sure this will be a good thing.