Picasa for Linux

[Ulrik Mikaelsson]

On 5/29/06, James Hall <rio at x5g.com> wrote:
>
> Why should people care how it was written or what libraries and API's it
> uses?
>
Two short terms: "maintainability" and "quality assurance".

If I, as a user got to choose, I would probably want a computer that could
plan my entire day, lift me up and carry me around all day, play all the new
tunes from all new artists, except "the ones I don't like" in my ear, and
making them fresh brewed coffee with beans not harvested more than 30
minutes ago. All this while I don't even notice it happens and most
importantly, for free.

Unfortunately, I don't always get to choose.

As a DEVELOPER, my priorities is normally laid somewhat different. What I as
a developer (and a user) thinks is important to Ubuntu, or anything I am
developing myself (no I'm not developing for Ubuntu, I just discovered it a
couple of months ago) is to have MAINTAINABLE software, with QUALITY
ASSURANCE.

I simply want to know that what I install at my fathers computer, a 4 hour
trip from where I live, it'll keep running, fast and slick as it did when I
installed it. I want an upgrade to be possible to perform off remote, and I
want to be able to install stuff for him from remote. For that to happen, I
must rely on that the core of the platform works as expected, "business as
usual". That is achieved through quality assurance, which is greatly aided
by maintainability.

Quality assurance could loosely be considered to find and fix bugs before
they affects a user, a task increasing exponentially with the amount of code
running. Every little piece should be tested and reviewed in numerous ways,
before beeing considered stable.

To include a beast like Wine as a prerequisiste for something like Picasa,
which most users is likely to install if it were available in repos, would
put a HUGE maintenance burden on the Ubuntu devs. Wine is NOT an API, as
many here seems to claim. It is a composition of MANY API:s. In Wine there
are counter-parts for the X api, mouse-handling, OpenGL, GTK, basic
filesystem-access, CUPS, Serial-port-handling, Sound, and a big bunch of
other API:s. As if things weren't difficult enough, Wine always has to
adapt. Adapt to changes in Linux, changes in Windows, even unexpected uses
of the Windows API that Microsoft themselves didn't count with. All this
dependencies leads to a LOT of integration and regression testing, making
Q&A a pure nightmare for anyone wanting to provide the same level of quality
in a wine-based app, such as Picasa, as in a Native Linux app, such as for
instance Firefox.

To take on this work for a single, closed source, application that does
something for which there are already alternatives, I think is a quite bad
idea. It is simply not worth the effort. Sure, I think Picasa is great, and
sure, I think it's a good thing that Google is releasing these goodies for
Linux. But it's not for Ubuntu to distribute.

Still, I'm going to advice my father to install the .deb. It worked for me.
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