Solang or Shotwell vs. F-Spot for Lucid

[Peteris Krisjanis]

>
> The Ubuntu Developers clearly have no understanding of this sector of
> technology and the IT industry and that sector being
> digital/photographic imaging. And if they did, they would ditch F-Spot
> and replace it with a suitable and "real" image management package.

First of all, I think you are misunderstanding reason of F-spot
existence. It came as Novell/Ximian guys went crazy with photographing
everything (digital cams went cheap) and they wanted good way to
manage and organize photos. It is for common people, not definitely
for pros. Think Google Picasa as example.

It won't be Apperture or Lightroom for Linux if you meant that. It
won't be your pro postproduction tool for your photos either.

Said that, I can agree that F-spot is not the best example how such
application should/could be, but for some time it was best open source
candidate in this field. Now, there are several alternatives
developed, so this might change. I like Eye Of Gnome and Gthumb, they
both are very powerful apps, but they still miss a boat, at least in
my imagination.

As a user I have accepted F-S existence in Ubuntu default because it
was better than nothing. But with alternatives on the rise (like
Shotwell mentioned in this thread), I am ready to vote for them to
replace F-S.

> There are alternatives out there that have been mentioned 100 times
> already (which I'm not going to mention again). The developers seem to
> either have their hands full with other projects or are walking around
> with curtains over their eyes.

That's harsh judgment. Unfortunately, all alternatives are not simply
ready to replace F-S right now (for example, Shotwell have interface
and stability issues, but that can be improved). Ubuntu developers
usually doesn't develop full blown apps like F-S, but they code
support tools, installation managers, etc and do packaging stuff. To
do app like F-S requires quite a resources.

I personally vote with code and translations. I will test Shotwell and
report bugs for devs to deal with so it can be at least be installable
from Universe in Lucid. So if you want F-Spot to be replaced with
better alternative, I suggest to jump on improving alternatives too.

Cheers,
Peter.