ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Robert Bruce Park <robert.park@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 09, 2013 at 11:01:02AM -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Apr 09, 2013, at 12:37 PM, Ma Xiaojun wrote:
> >I guess we should not require painful DEB packaging any more, or we
> >wrapper it nicely.
>
> It's certainly true that learning how to package for Debian/Ubuntu is a big
> hurdle for developers.  It seemed a big mystery to me when I started to learn
> how to do it.  Now that I know how to package and have helped others get
> started, I'm even more convinced that it's too high of a hurdle to require of
> developers.
>
> Learning how to package the Debian way is worth the investment if you are an
> Ubuntu and/or Debian developer (e.g. a core-dev, PPU, or DD), but IMO it's too
> much if you just want to build apps for the platform.

Personally, i think the idea of a centrally curated archive that
contains "all possible apps" is a bit mad. Compare to Google Play
store and Apple App Store... sure those companies are hosting those
apps centrally, but they do not have a review process for submission,
nor onerous packaging guidelines that must be strictly adhered to.

Before I was hired by Canonical, I was developing a GNOME app, and I
had hoped to have it included in Ubuntu universe... but now that I am
working here and doing packaging work for a living, I have just about
zero desire to include my app in the distro. The PPA is 'good enough'
and people who want my app can get the PPA.

I think we should probably look into streamlining the PPA-related
tools, like have some kind of browser integration so you can click a
link in firefox and make it enable a PPA for you, and then also have
some kind of graphical tool for using ppa-purge to uninstall. This way
app developers can make their own minimal PPAs with minimal packaging
boilerplate, skip right past all the ARB overhead, and still be easily
installed by users.

Perhaps for security reasons it might be necessary to create a new
kind of reduced-rights PPA so that PPAs can only provide new software
(take away the ability of the PPA to overwrite system components with
potentially-harmful components), but I'm not sure how to do such a
thing.