Proposing a New App Developer Upload Process

[Scott Kitterman]

Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:

>Le 05/09/2012 14:31, Scott Kitterman a écrit :
>> Why invest any time at all?
>Your question is worded in a way which I've an hard time parsing, so I 
>will try to reply as I understand it, let me know if that's not what
>you 
>mean
>
>"Why do I think people would want to invest any time on Ubuntu then" is
>
>the question?
>
>In which case I would say the OS and the applications are two different
>
>things...
>
>* Building a distribution,platform,desktop environment,OS is hard, it 
>does require discipline and work from lot of people collaborating, I 
>don't think you can "lower the standard" for the base of the system.
>
>Why invest any time at all? Different contributors have different 
>motivations: it's fun, it's interesting work, they like the result,
>they 
>are proud of what they work on, they like the people they are working 
>with, etc...
>
>* Dealing with applications is another topic, there is no reason we 
>would need so much coordination, reviews, testing for those. There is
>no 
>reason we need to tight them to our release cycle and freezes. We are 
>not the ones "owning" those apps, upstream are. Those upstream, for 
>most, don't ask to be part of our project, many don't even run Ubuntu, 
>they just want their apps to reach users. That's a different world and
>a 
>different problem space...
>
Sorry for being unclear.

You seemed to be suggesting that MyApps was a suitable path for a reduced effort mechanism for getting low quality applications available to users.

My question was if they are so bad, why expend any effort on them at all.

I get the "next month's beer festival app" use case, but that doesn't seem to be where most of the focus is.  Most of the focus seems to be on less ephemeral apps.  AFAICT, these pretty much fall into things that should be in the archive and things of insufficient quality where it's a positive feature not to deliver them.

There was a GSOC project in Debian last summer to build a tool that would create a Debian package for every Python package on PyPi.  The new Ruby policy is built around gem2deb.  Automatically generating some or all of a package isn't particularly novel.  I think it's better to focus on getting more good stuff into Ubuntu than to invent complex new mechanisms to provide packages that either could have been provided without the mechanisms or aren't of real benefit to the users.

Scott K