4 ms·

If you think that some linux distribution maintainer knows my software better than I do, then you are high as a kite.

choeger 6y ago
Ok, smartass, where and how do you locate the fonts installed in a system? How do you know if the system is on battery? How do you make sure that the temporary directory your service needs is actually mounted and writable? Let me guess, it works on your system, right? If you only ever develop desktop client software for Apple and Windows Systems where there is a whole fucking company to tell you these things via an API you are really not even in the same league as a developer that tries to ship software to different Unix like systems and at least somewhat adhere to standards and technical best practices that have been developed by a community.
- auggierose 6y ago
  It's called an API. I'd say an operating system that doesn't have that, is not much of an operating system. You don't sound like you have ever developed any kind of software. Do you really think that a missing API is fixed by some distro maintainer packaging your app properly? No.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  So your argument is that Linux is missing a massive number of standardized apis which other operating systems have had for years? That sounds like a massive gap that should be fixed and not something to just accept and shrug and have hacks to work around.
  - throwaway5752 6y ago
    It's open source, go write them, then. I'm serious. That's the whole point of this article and thread ultimately.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      The Linux ecosystem is managed by people and convincing dozens (or hundreds) of people to support what I write (which is required for an API to be anything but a N+1 toy) is no small effort. I play enough politics in my day job and have little desire to do so in my free time. As I see it, it'd take someone with a lot of political connections and political capital in the Linux ecosystem to be able to pull it off successfully. I have neither.
- Jasper_ 6y ago
  > Ok, smartass, where and how do you locate the fonts installed in a system? Rabbit's nest but the commonly accepted community API for font discovery is fontconfig. > How do you know if the system is on battery? Again, rabbit's nest but the commonly accepted community API for this used to be DeviceKit-Power. Then pm-utils. Now I think you're supposed to use UPower or poke through /sys/class/power_supply? https://upower.freedesktop.org/docs/Device.html https://upower.freedesktop.org/docs/Device.html I wrote the battery applet five years ago in gnome-shell and even I can't keep up. > How do you make sure that the temporary directory your service needs is actually mounted and writable? In theory /run and systemd-tempfiles are new enough standards but that hasn't stopped a misguided packager from misinterpreting a policy and patching my software to support /tmp, which was not a tmpfs on their distribution, causing users to blame me and send bugs my way. For all the things it gets wrong, Docker removes an entire class of misconfiguration errors that allows for more reproducibility and automation in configuring systems, and they do this partly by making the distribution irrelevant. For Linux to be a world-class OS, it needs to step up its ABI and distribution game and figure out how to squash bickering over things like application menu standards.
- auggierose 6y ago
  It's called an API. I'd say an operating system that doesn't have that, is not much of an operating system. Do you really think that a missing API is fixed by some distro maintainer packaging your app properly? No.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  > If you only ever develop desktop client software for Apple and Windows Systems where there is a whole fucking company to tell you these things via an API you are really not even in the same league as a developer that tries to ship software to different Unix like systems and at least somewhat adhere to standards and technical best practices that have been developed by a community. Isn't this an admission that linux is worse? Less skilled developers can successfully create working applications for Windows/Mac because they have unified and documented APIs to access these operations. But on linux you have a heterogeneous system that uses standards developed 50 years ago and require greater expertise to work with. "My system is harder to use" is not a selling point.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > "My system is harder to use" is not a selling point. Unless you're a Linux Desktop evangelist, then it is because it lets you feel smugly superior to people who don't like wasting their time with shit like this.
    - atoav 6y ago
      I run a dual boot system since half a year now (have been running windows for more than a decade). And the one thing I absolutely loved about Linux is that it does what I say. On Windows 10 there are things that are impossible to get rid of. That new browser that automatically adds itself to the desktop icons? Or the Onedrive icon in the explorer which you can only remove through registry hacks (and which might come back at any time after a update). Customising Windows is so amazingly hard and cumbersome, I was just blown away how easy and straightforward this was on Linux. I once gave my mother a Ubuntu installation after I had been particularilly annoyed by a malware she managed to catch on her Windows 7 machine. She has no idea how to use computers, but she really loved Ubuntu and told me it feels much clearer. She used it for nearly 4 years till the hardware died. To my surprise she had significantly less questions about how to do $x than before. My feeling is that the Linux desktop can be great for people with very simple needs or very advanced needs. It is that middle ground where it currently sucks I guess.
  - choeger 6y ago
rleigh 6y ago
That's not quite the right perspective. You most likely do know your software better, after all, you wrote it. However, their concern is the integration of your software into larger system, and they may well be more familiar with those issues than you are. In all my years of (Debian) distribution maintenance, this was the most typical cause of disagreement between packagers and upstreams. It's very common for upstreams to make fairly arbitrary decisions which might make sense in the context of an individual project, but which are not appropriate when considered as part of the system as an integrated whole. Neither are wrong per se, but as an upstream, your focus is on your project and it's easy to miss the bigger picture issues. Conversely, packagers' focus upon the system as a whole, so their view is at a higher level. Additional to this, don't just discount the knowledge and expertise of distribution maintainers. There are of course some who just blindly package up other people's work and aren't experts. However, there are others who are software authors in their own right, with decades of accumulated experience and understanding. The latter may well know more than you do, and might be able to provide some keen insights you could benefit from. There are an awful lot of developers who don't know how to make software releases properly in a way that allows it to be consumed straightforwardly by others, with proper understanding of API and ABI issues, proper versioning, and proper use of build systems.

Ok, smartass, where and how do you locate the fonts installed in a system? How do you know if the system is on battery? How do you make sure that the temporary directory your service needs is actually mounted and writable? Let me guess, it works on your system, right? If you only ever develop desktop client software for Apple and Windows Systems where there is a whole fucking company to tell you these things via an API you are really not even in the same league as a developer that tries to ship software to different Unix like systems and at least somewhat adhere to standards and technical best practices that have been developed by a community.

auggierose 6y ago
It's called an API. I'd say an operating system that doesn't have that, is not much of an operating system. You don't sound like you have ever developed any kind of software. Do you really think that a missing API is fixed by some distro maintainer packaging your app properly? No.
marcinzm 6y ago
So your argument is that Linux is missing a massive number of standardized apis which other operating systems have had for years? That sounds like a massive gap that should be fixed and not something to just accept and shrug and have hacks to work around.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  It's open source, go write them, then. I'm serious. That's the whole point of this article and thread ultimately.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    The Linux ecosystem is managed by people and convincing dozens (or hundreds) of people to support what I write (which is required for an API to be anything but a N+1 toy) is no small effort. I play enough politics in my day job and have little desire to do so in my free time. As I see it, it'd take someone with a lot of political connections and political capital in the Linux ecosystem to be able to pull it off successfully. I have neither.
Jasper_ 6y ago
> Ok, smartass, where and how do you locate the fonts installed in a system? Rabbit's nest but the commonly accepted community API for font discovery is fontconfig. > How do you know if the system is on battery? Again, rabbit's nest but the commonly accepted community API for this used to be DeviceKit-Power. Then pm-utils. Now I think you're supposed to use UPower or poke through /sys/class/power_supply? https://upower.freedesktop.org/docs/Device.html https://upower.freedesktop.org/docs/Device.html I wrote the battery applet five years ago in gnome-shell and even I can't keep up. > How do you make sure that the temporary directory your service needs is actually mounted and writable? In theory /run and systemd-tempfiles are new enough standards but that hasn't stopped a misguided packager from misinterpreting a policy and patching my software to support /tmp, which was not a tmpfs on their distribution, causing users to blame me and send bugs my way. For all the things it gets wrong, Docker removes an entire class of misconfiguration errors that allows for more reproducibility and automation in configuring systems, and they do this partly by making the distribution irrelevant. For Linux to be a world-class OS, it needs to step up its ABI and distribution game and figure out how to squash bickering over things like application menu standards.
auggierose 6y ago
It's called an API. I'd say an operating system that doesn't have that, is not much of an operating system. Do you really think that a missing API is fixed by some distro maintainer packaging your app properly? No.
UncleMeat 6y ago
> If you only ever develop desktop client software for Apple and Windows Systems where there is a whole fucking company to tell you these things via an API you are really not even in the same league as a developer that tries to ship software to different Unix like systems and at least somewhat adhere to standards and technical best practices that have been developed by a community. Isn't this an admission that linux is worse? Less skilled developers can successfully create working applications for Windows/Mac because they have unified and documented APIs to access these operations. But on linux you have a heterogeneous system that uses standards developed 50 years ago and require greater expertise to work with. "My system is harder to use" is not a selling point.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > "My system is harder to use" is not a selling point. Unless you're a Linux Desktop evangelist, then it is because it lets you feel smugly superior to people who don't like wasting their time with shit like this.
  - atoav 6y ago
    I run a dual boot system since half a year now (have been running windows for more than a decade). And the one thing I absolutely loved about Linux is that it does what I say. On Windows 10 there are things that are impossible to get rid of. That new browser that automatically adds itself to the desktop icons? Or the Onedrive icon in the explorer which you can only remove through registry hacks (and which might come back at any time after a update). Customising Windows is so amazingly hard and cumbersome, I was just blown away how easy and straightforward this was on Linux. I once gave my mother a Ubuntu installation after I had been particularilly annoyed by a malware she managed to catch on her Windows 7 machine. She has no idea how to use computers, but she really loved Ubuntu and told me it feels much clearer. She used it for nearly 4 years till the hardware died. To my surprise she had significantly less questions about how to do $x than before. My feeling is that the Linux desktop can be great for people with very simple needs or very advanced needs. It is that middle ground where it currently sucks I guess.
- choeger 6y ago

rleigh 6y ago

That's not quite the right perspective. You most likely do know your software better, after all, you wrote it. However, their concern is the integration of your software into larger system, and they may well be more familiar with those issues than you are. In all my years of (Debian) distribution maintenance, this was the most typical cause of disagreement between packagers and upstreams. It's very common for upstreams to make fairly arbitrary decisions which might make sense in the context of an individual project, but which are not appropriate when considered as part of the system as an integrated whole. Neither are wrong per se, but as an upstream, your focus is on your project and it's easy to miss the bigger picture issues. Conversely, packagers' focus upon the system as a whole, so their view is at a higher level. Additional to this, don't just discount the knowledge and expertise of distribution maintainers. There are of course some who just blindly package up other people's work and aren't experts. However, there are others who are software authors in their own right, with decades of accumulated experience and understanding. The latter may well know more than you do, and might be able to provide some keen insights you could benefit from. There are an awful lot of developers who don't know how to make software releases properly in a way that allows it to be consumed straightforwardly by others, with proper understanding of API and ABI issues, proper versioning, and proper use of build systems.