Make Ubuntu desktop a better platform for App Developers

[Barry Warsaw]

On Apr 09, 2013, at 06:23 AM, Andrew King wrote:

>Remember that when you "abstract all that away" people get enraged about
>weird problems.

It's never going to be possible to abstract everything away for all packages.
We shouldn't even try to do that.

But I do think (or at least *hope*) that there will be enough generality that
*most* apps will happily take advantage of the abstractions and never need to
go deeper.

This is always the trade-off between making things easy and making things
flexible, and we'll have to work hard to find the right balance, with escape
hatches for those cases where all the complexity and flexibility is needed.

>Packaging is not horribly complicated and even less so if you use one of
>several "normal" build systems.

You're right, if you live in that world every day.  But also, when you know
how to package, you often forget just how steep a learning curve it is and how
much you have to know (and hunt for) before you can produce good packages.  I
think we do a disservice to our app developers if we don't try to make this
easier.

-Barry