continuing conversation from UDS-N - Application Review Board

[Scott Kitterman]

"Allison Randal" <allison at canonical.com> wrote:

>On 11/11/2010 07:52 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>>
>> I wasn't in all the the ARB related sessions, so perhaps this got
>rediscussed
>> in a session I didn't attend, but my recollection was that the idea
>for
>> Maverick was to put everything in /opt except for things like
>.desktop files
>> that need to be in the user's path to work and to drop those into an
>extras
>> specific location that would be in the user's path, but not the
>system path.
>
>Yes, that's what this proposal is saying, though in more detail. 
>Specifically, apps can only install outside /opt when it's impossible
>to 
>install or run in /opt with current technology, and are expected to 
>either install in a custom path (named extras) or to modify the
>filename 
>(with extras) so the files for the app don't pollute the general 
>namespace. We can't have them install outside the system path, though, 
>because the precise problem with these files is that they can't install
>
>or run outside the standard system paths.
>
>I'll edit a bit to make those points clearer in the draft.
>
I will confess to a bit of frustration at this point.

I feel like we've had a couple of rounds of discussion where some consensus was reached only to be offset later by "Oops. Too hard.".

I think it's clear the ARB is going to go ahead with something for Maverick, so rather than continue to discuss what ought to be for Maverick, I think you ought to announce what you are doing based on what's doable and what additional reviews you are doing to offset associated risks.

I suspect doable is a regular package plus detailed code review.

My view is that this is not enough of an incremental improvement in timely delivery to make a significant difference to application developers and the resources that might go onto ARB reviews would be better utilized making the tools better to make the process faster and lighter for Natty (recognizing that these aren't necessarily fungible).

We are only going to get a few shots at convincing application developers that delivering on top of Ubuntu is easy and fast.  If it's not easy and fast, credibility of future improvements will be hurt.

Scott K