EOL for couchdb and desktopcouch

[Rick Spencer]

On 11/22/2011 04:45 PM, John Rowland Lenton wrote:

>> 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.
I strongly agree with this. I think I've probably written more 
desktop-couch code than anyone outside the Online Services team.

DesktopCouch performance on the client, and failures to sync on the 
server have been have both major thorns in my side. Not to mention 
suffering through writing javascript map/reduce statements, ug!

I, therefore, welcome this move. I really want the ability to have a 
local but synced store with an easy API, but DesktopCouch was just not 
able to provide this. I am very grateful that the team is going to apply 
what's been learned to a new generation of such functionality, and I 
will be the first to write a DictionaryGrid that uses it! :)

Cheers, Rick


>
>> 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,
>
>
>