[Portland] Current plan summarized

[Lubos Lunak]

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 17:46, Ian Murdock wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 17:03 +0100, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > On Wednesday 22 March 2006 14:42, Ian Murdock wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 20:40 +0100, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > > > ISVs usually don't use package dependencies at all. They either link
> > > > statically or ship the shared library as well.
> > > > Unless it is part of some kind of standard like LSB.
> > >
> > > That's why the ultimate goal is to get Portland into the LSB, so ISVs
> > > can know with certainty whether the runtime support is there without
> > > the need for static linking or bundling the shared libraries or
> > > thinking about fallback scenarios etc.
> >
> >  It's a question whether fallback scenarios can be avoided, because this
> > is not about systems but desktops. If the user runs TWM, the app may be
> > out of luck.
>
> A user running twm is hardly the common case. I'd suggest we focus on
> the common case first.

 The common case, if I'm not mistaken, is something along the lines of LSB not 
saying a single thing about desktop and all desktops basically ignoring LSB. 
Besides, we focus on on the common case, fallback is just a fallback.

> > > If it's in the LSB, ISVs can use it
> > > knowing it will work out of the box on LSB compliant systems,
> > > which means every major distro they're likely to care about today.
> > >
> > > I still have this nagging feeling we're making this more
> > > complicated than it needs to be. What is being done in the DAPI
> > > library that couldn't otherwise be done with a set of
> > > scripts?
> >
> >  Anything that doesn't fit description "dead simple"?
>
> Such as? I'm looking for a specific use case here. My gut tells me the
> common case is "dead simple",

 Preventing people from dying from laughter? If I this minute stopped doing 
KDE development, moved to Windows and all I got from Microsoft was a big 
bunch of scripts, I'd definitely be in danger of that happening to me.

> and Jeremy's perspective as an ISV seems 
> to confirm this. We should come up with a solution for the common case
> first, then turn our attention to the hairy edge cases that add 95%
> of the complexity, rather than trying to tackle the hairy edges first.
>
> > > With a script based approach, you don't have to worry
> > > about ABIs at all, and trust me, if there's a way to do this
> > > without having to worry about ABIS, you want to go that route.
> >
> >  Feel free to, nobody's stopping you (how many more times will I have to
> > repeat this?).
>
> Are we writing code for the sake of writing code, or are we trying to
> solve a problem the ISV community has brought to our attention? I'm
> simply trying to provide some insight here, as someone who isn't
> an ISV himself but who spends a fair amount of time talking with
> them, as well as someone who spends a fair amount of time talking
> to the people we have to convince to ship this (i.e. the distros).

<blunt>
 Listen, this is getting boring. Very boring and I'm getting tired of it. This 
list saw about two months worth of insight and nothing at all came out of it. 
Then it was dead for about a month, and then I (not we, _I_) started writing 
the DAPI code to get things actually moving. Since then there have been two 
groups of people, first of them actually trying to do something, be it 
helping with DAPI or the scripts, and second group, who only throw stopping 
power at the first one.

You want scripts? Fine, help Kevin, Jeremy and whoever else is working on that 
(if there's anybody) and stop telling me how awfully wrong I am. If everybody 
like this actually helped with the scripts instead, there would a shiny 
collection of scripts ready by now. And you'd also know their limitations.
</blunt>

 And if there would be somebody having any constructive feedback on DAPI, I'd 
appreciate that. I have received zero feedback on 0.1 so far.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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