Adept not ready to be used by non-adept developers

[manchicken]

On Saturday 30 June 2007 11:11:30 Juan Carlos Torres wrote:
> On Saturday 30 June 2007, Paul Dufresne wrote:
> > I really hope we won't ship Kubuntu 7.10 with adept in the bad state it
> > is now in Gutsy.
>
> Gutsy is in alpha right now. Things break, almost daily. Of course, unless
> people are willing to help report these bugs, developers may not know about
> them and be able to fix them in time. You need to remember that 1) you are
> using alpha software and 2) the state of alpha software will not be the
> same as the released version.
>
> > I just hit the wall again with adept-updater.
> > Just accepted to update the system.
> > At the beginning, it has found an error.
> > At this moment, it seems to show a message dialog indicating that an
> > error happened, with an ok button.
> > While the window is open, it continue to update the system.
> > A big problem, is that when you click Ok, it seems to directly quit the
> > application without even removing
> > the lock.
>
> Maybe you can give more details? What was the error? What was the error
> message? We can't read minds, nor can we guess what happened. It would be
> extremely helpful if we knew even those two things.
>
> > I hear you say, we know, just fill a bug report.
> > Well, I would say that is not a bug, because the developers of Adept
> > seems to not event have think about managing errors.
> > On the web page of Adept: http://web.mornfall.net/adept.html we can read
> > that only next big version, version 3,
> > will handle errors.
>
> You said "developers", but you have only seen what one man (the lead
> developer) said. He is not the only developer for Adept. If you haven't
> noticed, there were changes in Adept on Feisty. There is development going
> on. Perhaps you just haven't noticed.
>
> "next big version, version 3."
>
> Let me give you a hint about (most) software development. There are big,
> major versions, and there are minor versions. The minor versions come in
> between the major versions. Adept is currently in major version 2, minor
> version 1 = 2.1. Then in between those, there are also small fixes here and
> there. So just because the next "big" version is version 3, it doesn't mean
> there will be no changes before that.
>
> > And the worst, is that most users are aware of the situation, and knows
> > very well how to fix the lock problem and use
> > dpkg to continue.
> > BTW: if you could remember me the magic command lines to fix this, it
> > would be great!
>
> The command is "sudo dpkg --configure -a".
> You'd be happy to know that there is someone who's already making an that
> will try to resolve these kinds of errors, without the user having to
> resort to typing commands. He's hoping to release it by Gutsy.
>
> > But it seems that nobody wish to tackle the task of fixing Adept, or ask
> > to remove it from 7.10 and replace it by
> > an other package manager.
>
> I think that's a bit unfair. Everyone (well, almost everyone) working on
> Kubuntu are volunteers. We all work together, most in their free time, to
> help make Kubuntu a great distro. We may miss a few spots, but I assure you
> it's not because of lack of concern for user experience. What we do lack is
> manpower, coders, and bug reporters/triagers. We need and accept every bit
> of help we can get.
>
> As for replacing it with another package manager, until a better KDE
> package manager for APT comes around, I'm afraid we're out of choices.
> Synaptic is not an option.

I must **VERY STRONGLY** second the reminder that Gutsy is in ALPHA and is in 
no way considered stable for any real purpose.  That said, adept has some 
issues but it is far from the doom and gloom you're expressing.  If we have 
SPECIFIC problems, lets work on specific problems.

We're working hard to ensure that adept is getting the TLC necessary, but 
citing a package error without more information on the actual package that 
was causing problems isn't going to help much.

Adept is going to be the wrong tool to troubleshoot package errors.  For that 
you are going to have to hit the command-line, and I don't really think 
that's too much of a problem.  If there are problems with packages then it is 
a problem with the package and not adept.  Adept merely needs to be more 
fault tolerant.

That said, I've been working on a small fix to get the locked database issue 
taken care of.  It's mostly working but it's got some wrinkles I need to iron 
out.  I anticipate having the patch ready sometime late this week (sorry, 
wife is pregnant, can't really spend oodles of time working on it).

ALL of this said, let's try to be more moderate about issues here.  Blowing 
problems out of proportion with titles like "Adept not ready to be used by 
non-adept developers" is just silly.  That is in no way anywhere near the 
truth.  MANY people use Adept all the time without issue.  I'm not saying 
this to in any way minimize your problems or anybody else's.  We know that 
adept needs work, and we're working on it.  But it is more helpful if you 
would cite specific issues and post bug reports, as I have spent at LEAST 4-5 
hours in the last week looking at the bug tracker, and 3 issues have been 
solved.

If you don't post a bug report then we can't track it.  When hackers go to fix 
problems with programs we don't check our email, we check our bug trackers.  
Many of the hackers aren't even on the -users mailing list, so they wouldn't 
have gotten this message in the first place.  It really is paramount that you 
submit new bug reports for ones that don't have reports and add your comments 
and information to existing bug reports when they do exist.

-- 
~ manchicken <><
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nfluence with large hammer.
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