EOL for couchdb and desktopcouch

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad]

Den 22. nov. 2011 16:45, skrev John Rowland Lenton:
> 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. 

Well, in your original email, you did recommend that it be moved out of 
main, didn't you? Coming from a developer who is both the upstream and 
the primary distro sponsor, how do you think the audience -- who happens 
to be the app developers you seek to attract -- should interpret it?

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.


I hadn't actually considered DesktopCouch to be dependent on Ubuntu One. 
I considered Ubuntu Ones database synchronization service to be 
dependent on the DesktopCouch, but not vice versa. Much the same way, I 
don't expect my home directory to be dependent on Ubuntu One file 
synchronization service.

While I can understand the reasons why you feel it necessary to pull the 
plug on the db sync service, it is not immediately obvious to me why 
that would necessarily result in you dropping support for local storage 
in personal databases on the desktop. I don't see anything wrong with 
DesktopCouch itself. By the way, what is going to happen with the 
server-side software that you're now abandoning? Will you GPL it and 
release it so that others can benefit from the work? After all, even if 
you couldn't make it scale to millions of databases, it might still be 
useful as a residential sync service, for example.

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.

No, I don't think our goals are the same. My goal is to create software 
using tools that are available for many platforms, such as Python, GTK 
and CouchDB. I would then like to enable the users to sync their data 
between all their devices, across platforms. Your goal is similar, but 
from a completely different perspective. You want to build a public 
service for millions and millions of users. That makes sense to you, 
because that's your business. But it doesn't make sense to me, because 
most families and businesses doesn't have millions of members. From my 
perspective, the stack I referred to earlier, which you until very 
recently have been advocating, _does_ work.

Tell me you're going to GPL and release your server-side db-sync stuff, 
and I'll have all my enthusiasm back and stop nagging. :)

> Thank you for caring,
Likewise. :)

Jo-Erlend Schinstad