EOL for couchdb and desktopcouch

[John Rowland Lenton]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:20:41 +0100, Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm rather dismayed by this, I have to say.

I can imagine. We (Ubuntu One) tried as much as we could (beyond what
some would call reasonable) to not have to come to this end, but, as I
said, we could find no credible way forwards. This has been a very
painful decision to reach.

> First you convince 
> developers to rely on your infrastructure for their apps, and then, out 
> of the blue, you remove key parts of it?

it wasn't working. That's the whole point.

> It's not the first time, either.

I don't think we've removed developer-facing features before. We've
removed services when they didn't work. I *might* be forgetting
something, but I think not. Obviously.

> One thing is removing it from Ubuntu One. If you can't manage 
> the large amounts of users and data, then that means U1 shouldn't have 
> been taken out of beta and that it in no way is ready for general use. 

A reasonable point. Which I disagree with, at several levels, but I
don't think this is the place to get into that.

> This is another example of Canonical showing poor judgement in its 
> communication.

communication is hard. Again, I disagree that this particular instance
was an example of us struggling to communicate; I think you're reading
more and less from my email than what I thought I was putting into
it.

> However, removing support for tools that apps depend upon to store and 
> retrieve data locally is something else entirely. It is incomprehensible 
> to me that you would even consider this.

I don't know where you got the impression I or we were proposing or
suggesting that the distribution do that.

Ubuntu One, as upstream of desktopcouch, is letting Ubuntu know that
we're not going to go on working on desktopcouch, and the service is
going away from our servers. This is the next step after letting the
more prominent stakeholders know in person at UDS.

> We can't know 
> what's going on internally in Canonical, but we know for a fact that it 
> is willing to drop support without warning.

The email you responded to was the warning. Had you talked with the
Ubuntu One developers at UDS or since then, we would've told you. We
individually talked with the main stakeholders at or before UDS. We had
U1DB sessions at UDS, and we have openly talked about the status of
couchdb with developers since around that time.

> You're not only making fools of developers, however. You're also making 
> fools out of advocates. As late as yesterday, I wrote about Ubuntu 
> becoming a very attracting platform with focus on phones, tablets, etc. 
> One of the things I wrote about, was the ability to sync databases 
> between your devices, enabling you to keep working even when you're 
> offline. Yesterday, that symbolised the strength and potential of 
> Ubuntu. Today, the same thing symbolises uncertainty and unreliability.

It's interesting that you mention this, because the drive to enable
Ubuntu to be that platform is one of the things that is pushing us to
fix things. CouchDB wasn't working for us to do what we and you want to
do with the platform, so we're swapping the component out for one that
*will* work.

Thank you for caring,
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