Proposing a New App Developer Upload Process

[Didier Roche]

Le 05/09/2012 15:30, Scott Kitterman a écrit :
>
> 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.

I don't agree it's only for low quality apps. More than once, people 
asked me to package their apps into ubuntu. This is particularly 
annoying when I have no interest at all in the package itself. The last 
case is pyromaths, which turned out to be quite popular in schools. It's 
definitively a quality apps and I kind of regret to upload it to ubuntu 
proper instead of letting them deal with myapps for now as I have to 
admit I won't do a good job tracking them.

So it means it's not to packagers to decide of the importance for the 
user of a package, and naturally, they would prefer to scratch their own 
itch. It also means it's more difficult for the application developer to 
get a newer version in, with latency of answering, reaching the right 
contact, and so on.

The MyApps story is to avoid those 2 pitfalls to occur:
* having ubuntu developers working on what they want to work on and 
focus their effort on that, following the components they selected 
closely and be able to help them.
* having application developers being able to have the control where 
they should have: their own applications and decide when they update. We 
can enable them to update as long as they do no harm to the platform 
(like in the file conflict case, and many other use cases requiring 
insulation). The ultimate goal is that all the packaging part is 
helped/assisted to them: it's not because I want to upload my 
application to ubuntu that I have to become a packager and know every 
detail of the debian policy. I just want to deliver my application to users.

Didier