brainstorming for UDS-N - Application Developers

[Marc Deslauriers]

On Mon, 2010-10-04 at 15:31 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> >...
> >> If we have to package the applications ourselves because it requires
> >> years of experience and understanding of an inordinate amount of
> >> complexity, what does that say about our package management system?
> > 
> > Packaging requires experience because of the way software is installed,
> > updated and interacts with other software. It requires understanding of
> > the system.
> 
> Yes, that's part of the problem. Packaging should not require that
> experience and understanding of the system. Thirteen-year-olds write and
> sell iPad applications.

<snip>

> 
> > Also, packaging a simple desktop application is really easy this days.
> 
> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Complete> is 16518 words long.
> Even the "Basic Packaging" section alone is longer than the US
> Declaration of Independence, and the original US Constitution, combined.

I think we should write a one-click "Package and submit to Ubuntu
Software Centre" plugin for Anjuta. The package format isn't the
problem, the steps required to create a package is.

> >> This application deployment system I describe should at no point block
> >> on a human being from the Ubuntu project like our existing systems,
> >> both the regular archive and -extras, do.  These quite simply cannot
> >> scale.  Instead, lets create an automatic system that takes an
> >> application submission, runs its test suite, does some static
> >> analysis, and conducts any other sanity checks we can think of before
> >> letting it through to the archive.  If any of these tests fail, it
> >> simply rejects the application back to the developer.  Let them worry
> >> about fixing it.  Let them take complete ownership of their work.
> > 
> > No, we create a distribution for our users not as a place for
> > developers to dump their software to.
> 
> In the past four years, not one but two operating systems have each,
> starting from zero, accumulated more than 20 *times* as many
> applications as Ubuntu has. What we are doing is not working. It's time
> to try something else.

How about a fart app contest? :)

I think we need developer guidelines, a great IDE, a relatively stable
API, documentation on how to port apps from other platforms, and an easy
one-click submittal process.

Though, even with those things, we're not going to attract a lot of
developers for particular applications that have great free alternatives
built-in. One of the reasons there are so many iPhone/Android apps, is
that the platform doesn't come by default with a wide selection.

Marc.