brainstorming for UDS-N - Application Developers

[Shane Fagan]

Hmmmm ive been thinking about this topic again and one thing came into
my head and that was are .deb packages actually straightforward to
deliver easily? The answer for me is yes and no ive delved into the
packaging docs a few times and found it to be very difficult to
understand and when I actually tried it it wasnt so bad. Its a change of
mindset for developers though.

When I develop programs in college using visual studio for VB or C# or
even the odd C++ app you have 1 button that does a lot of crap in the
backround to make the .exe file for you. The only experience I had in
developing for ubuntu that was even close to that was programming with
Geany but even that isnt as easy as visual studio. I havent looked at
the mac development environment but it looks comparable to the
experience in visual studio from the website.

So at a base level we are more difficult to get going on from the start
if you are trying to stumble your way to programming on Ubuntu. Id say
to achieve the one click experience that the rival platforms have we
should patch up geany with elements of quickly for project management,
packaging sharing, bzr integration..etc all of whats built into quickly
at the moment.

I also think that maybe we should investigate our own package format
that has a lower barrier of entry than .deb for quick and easy releases
of programs. For places like ppas where we dont distribute changelogs
and we dont really need a singular maintainer since it might be
maintained by an entire launchpad group. So then all we really need are
the depends and the setup and build scripts for those kind of releases.
Also for copyright assignment we could put the copyrights at the top of
the source files. Anyhow thats just an extra idea that came to me but it
would be a lot of work and its kinda out there.

--fagan


On Tue, 2010-09-28 at 14:31 -0700, Rick Spencer wrote:
> We want to empower, engage and harness application developers to develop
> on and for Ubuntu. These sessions cover the many elements in achieving
> that goal.
> 
> What's high on your list for this area?
> 
> There are some existing conversations and threads that people should
> feel free to comment on in addition to any new areas:
> * Changes to the implementation of the New Apps on stable releases
> (suggestions have included changing the system to use backports as an
> avenue onto a stable release, for example).
> * Changes to the Application Review Board process (including, for
> example, eliminating it and replacing it with a streamlined backports
> process).
> * Enhancement, changes to tools such as Glade, Gedit, etc...
> * Anything about Quickly and/or Quickly Widgets, including new
> templates, improvements to the existing template, new widgets, etc...
> * Information Architecture for application developers, including a
> developers manual, etc... 
> 
> Cheers, Rick
> 
>