brainstorming for UDS-N - Application Developers

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Scott Kitterman wrote on 07/10/10 03:21:
>
> On Wednesday, October 06, 2010 07:23:00 am Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
>...
>> By spending less time on other people's applications, we could spend
>> more time testing fixes to Ubuntu core.
> 
> What's Ubuntu's core?

Perhaps there are better definitions, but my current working definition
is "ubuntu-desktop and everything it Depends: on". (Kubuntu Core would
be the equivalent with kubuntu-desktop, and so on.)

This is distinct from "software we ship by default", e.g. things that
ubuntu-desktop Recommends:.

>...
>>>>>> Every general-purpose operating system has gone through a stage
>>>>>> where the primary publisher of software for it was the OS vendor
>>>>>> themselves. Every popular general-purpose operating system quickly
>>>>>> outgrew that stage.
>...
> I don't recall having used a general purpose operating system where I
> viewed the O/S developer as the primary publisher of software for it

That's because for most of them since the Apple II, that stage ended
before the OS was released to the public. (The initial iPhone OS was a
notable exception, where Apple was the primary software publisher for
almost a year afterwards.)

>...
> Fundamentally, things like the ARB don't scale to the level that
> Android covers.  If this became wildly successful, any manual review
> process would become a roadblock.  It should be a design goal for it
> to be "safe" for new applications to be added to software center with
> no manual review at all.  If we don't get that, as soon as we move
> from developing an "unpopular" OS to developing a "popular" OS, we'll
> be stuck.
>...

Entirely agreed.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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