Forget Hardy

[David Fox]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 3:44 AM, Joel Bryan Juliano
<joelbryan.juliano at gmail.com> wrote:

> a.) EVERYTHING is tied up with Launchpad just like .Mac in OSX. It's
> uninterchangeable, unconfigurable or closed model. There are web
> services out there that most people are comfortable with, like
> reporting bugs in Google Code, Ohloh or maybe a website of an

It's a centralized bug-reporting system. That is a good thing. One
just has to look at one place to get bug reports or to submit them, or
comment on them. Why should the developers have to chase down half a
dozen blog sites? IMHO there are too many blog sites already, and
other than using google search intelligently it's going to be hard to
find writeups, bug reports, comments etc., unless someone hands you a
link.

I'm just getting my feet wet in Ubuntu and having a few centralized
sites such as launchpad, ubuntugeek, ubuntuforums and the support
lists are vital and I don't think any other fractionalization would be
welcomed. I obviously can't speak for the entire community.

There's a few places where developers hang out - packages hosted on
sourceforge.net, or googlecode, but they aren't designed necessarily
to be "part of" ubuntu. Nevertheless, I make use of a few of them, as
well as track development via svn on a few packages (stellarium &
tovid).


> each websites that offer the same services. But I just hoped that they
> have used a more open way of doing things like using RSS to migrate

RSS really isn't a bad idea. But don't the individual sites offer RSS
as a way to "subscribe" to their web pages, forums, etc.? And torrent
is available for distribution media, and has been for a very long
time. Almost anything one could want is a quick trip to the
repositories.

> centralized information sources today is not as scalable as it would
> be in the future, there would be so much demand something just cannot
> hold them.

Scalability is a valid concern, but I so far haven't noticed launchpad
or other sites to be clogged to the point of being unusable.
Occasionally, one has a hiccup on the repositories, but that's quickly
cleaned up. If its anything like the debian model, the main repository
sites in (insert country here) don't resolve to a single IP - maybe
they do in some countries.

>
> b.) Linux in general have no universal package management system. If
> your using Debian you'll be using apt, but the default is you can't
> install RPM packages safely without any problems. This limitation is

Apt works extremely well. And I've used RPM on Mandrake for several
years as well. I'm not going to get into a which packaging format is
better in terms of what's available, and some packaging formats I've
not yet tried (yum, for instance). Every distro has its similarities
and differences, and it would be difficult, but probably possible to
obtain a debian based app for ${foo} and have it install correctly on
a ubuntu system. But I wouldn't expect it to work, and I'd first
attempt to get the package from my distro's repository. If that
failed, I'd go get the source from upstream, and compile it myself.
But if I had to do that a lot, I'd look at a different distro first.

Not being able to install RPMs is not a deficiency in ubuntu. RHEL5,
Fedora, Mandriiva, and the other RPM based systems are different than
ubuntu/debian.


> really pushing away software companies from creating software for
> Linux, because they cannot clearly asses their market, there are
> multiple distributions, and multiple formats of package management.

They'd start with the source tar.bz2 or whatever and then it would be
up to the packagers in the individual distros to adapt it and package
it for those distros. That's how it's always worked, and it's worked
extremely well. How do you think there can be ca. 13K packages in
multiverse if developers can't get their software out to the users,
anyway?


> There are no single software package for Linux that is specifically
> designed to work in Linux in general. The reality is the user would

And there can't be, unless you go to the source. What about all the
non-x86 users? You can't run x86 software on a mips or sparc machine,
at least not natively. Linux is not a "PC" OS even though the majority
of users are on "PC"s.