Ubiquity NG - was Re: ubiquity migrated to git

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

On 05.05.2018 08:15, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

Hi folks,

> Third, we have Electron, which is the HTML5 app framework used by world > class app developers. Skype, Spotify and a ton of GREAT apps on 
Ubuntu> are Electron apps.
quite frankly: I wouldn't count things Skype to "world class".
It belongs to those applications that I only touch if I ever have to,
and then only in a carefully restricted container.

I've tried to build a bunch of electron apps - none of them worked,
(except the trivial hello-world) lots of ugly breaks deep down in the
long dependency chain. I wonder whether anybody ever seriously tested
this stuff before releasing.

Anyways, the whole nodejs stuff has always been really painful -
especially if some native code is involved. Everything's just
bleeding edge, no long term maintenance ... somewhere deep in these
huge dependency chains, something always breaks. Even worse: it often
starts downloading binaries (that tend to be incompatible w/ the host),
calls the wrong compiler w/ wrong flags, etc, etc, etc.

Exactly the kind of stuff that I really can't have on production
systems.

A reasonable approach would require rewriting npm in a way that it
takes modules from the system, helps in automatic debianization, so
we can run everything though the usual deb toolchain and maintainers
can easily patch whenever necessary. Certainly possible, but *a lot*
of work to do, before we reach a reasonable stable state.


--mtx

-- 
Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
info at metux.net -- +49-151-27565287