Distributors entering Flatpakland [LWN.net]

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 10:13 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Distributors entering Flatpakland by LtWorf
Parent article: Distributors entering Flatpakland

> You don't need to be a "software prodigy" to change a couple of things here and there. And on Debian systems that's really really easy.

> apt-get build-dep xxx
> apt-get source xxx
> [do your thing]
> dpkg-buildpackage

You're missing a very important point.

For the typical man on the Clapham Omnibus, they don't have difficulty following instructions, they have problems with "[do your thing]".

Let me list the languages I know - FORTRAN IV, Fortran 77, C, Forth, DataBasic, Perl, VBA ... (to dramatically varying abilities - 77, C, VBA, DataBasic I've seriously used ... and I've probably missed a few ...) and still I have major trouble even trying to UNDERSTAND the code base of various projects I want to get involved in - lilypond, LO, ScarletDME. I can build it easy enough - FFS my main distro is Gentoo!

If I, a seriously bright programmer, have trouble then your average guy isn't going to stand a hope. Yes, a lot of my problem is lack of time, but then that's true of average bloke, who DOESN'T WANT TO KNOW unless he's forced to.

You forget we are a self-selecting minority. To 99% of the people out there, all this is an irrelevance, a distraction, something they would much rather not know about even when they are forced to care ...

Cheers,
Wol

to post comments

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 10:36 UTC (Mon) by ldearquer (guest, #137451) [Link] (1 responses)

Some software is way too big for doing casual modifications. Such is the case of LO -you will spend hours only to figure out where stuff is located (some documentation is provided for this though)
However many other packages are more manageable. My wacom was triggering a zoom event by accident on some drawing program, which was pretty annoying, and there was no config option to disable this behavior. But it was on a debian based distro, so getting the sources, searching "wheel", commenting out the wheel event and rebuilding the package was quite straight forward.

Distributors entering Flatpakland

Posted Jul 11, 2022 16:05 UTC (Mon) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link]

+1 I agree