Tracking App Development issues

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad]

App development on Ubuntu is far, far, from perfect. In some cases, it 
is completely broken. But as far as I'm aware, there's no place to 
collect these issues. If we want to find good solutions, then we have to 
understand the problem. We need to track these issues in one place so 
that we can get a good overview. We have to start seeing things from the 
app developer point of view.

I will use an example. I use Quickly, Bazaar, Geany, Glade, Python and 
GTK for nearly all my GUI projects, and I recommend that set of tools to 
anyone who wants to learn how to develop applications on Ubuntu. Those 
are six different things. They are really more than six; there is a 
connection between Python and GTK and between Quickly and Bazaar and 
Glade. So, even if there are no bugs in Python and no bugs in GTK, 
Python and GTK can still be broken.

All these projects have different issue trackers, but an app developer 
should not be expected to pay close attention to all those "details". If 
you can't develop apps on Ubuntu, then that's an app development bug, 
even if the real problem is in the GIR library that enables you to use 
GTK. For instance, it is currently not possible to write a custom Gtk 
TreeModel using Python. The issue has been known for about a year and 
there's no sign that it'll get fixed anytime soon. It is quite possibly 
a small bug that could be easily fixed if people knew about it, but for 
me, fixing GIR language bindings for GTK+ is not feasible.

Since this is a less common thing to do, it is not well known in Ubuntu 
app development community. So if someone asks, there'll be no response. 
The result is that Ubuntu app development is broken, nobody knows why, 
and if it gets fixed, it will not be because of the app development 
community.

We should have a way for app developers to report issues that prevents 
them from writing applications for Ubuntu. At least then, people would 
have a chance to contribute. Reporting things on IRC simply doesn't 
work. We don't learn, we don't improve and we are setting new app 
developers up for extreme disappointments, such as the one I felt when I 
realized that the last four months of work has been wasted. This is the 
third Ubuntu application project I've had to abort because of low-level 
bugs that I can't fix and few others care about.

App development on Ubuntu, for anything other than hobby or highly 
professional developers with plenty of time,  is currently a gamble. 
That is unacceptable. So what do we do about it?



-- 
Jo-Erlend Schinstad