Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Seth Woodworth s...@isforinsects.com wrote: Walter Bender wrote: Slightly off topic, but reading between the lines, it seems there is something more fundamentally broken here. 5000 packages. The Apple app store adds that many new apps every week it seems. Why aren't there 5 million packages available instead of just 5000? Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: Money. The App Store is proprietary software. Furthermore, the App Store has strong incentives to update and release new software constantly. Each new app is placed into a 'new app' view that encourages installation of new apps. It extends their marketing beyond keyterm search and apple's ranking/voting system (which has problems with popularity bias: apps that are popular get more popular because they are popular). Free software (ideally) has incentives to improve existing software, contributing towards existing projects/packages and discourages creating trivial clones of existing software. That is ignoring the clones we make of proprietary software. Granted that a lot of what is offered in the Apple app store is recycled and not very interesting, but it is an ecology that is encouraging some level of participation. My reason for bringing this up in this thread is that I think we could be more packaging-friendly to the newbie or want-to-be developer in terms of growing our ecosystem. A goal of the XO bundling scheme was to make it easy to participate. We shouldn't lose sight of that goal if we want to expand the culture of free software. -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:04 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Seth Woodworth s...@isforinsects.com wrote: Walter Bender wrote: Slightly off topic, but reading between the lines, it seems there is something more fundamentally broken here. 5000 packages. The Apple app store adds that many new apps every week it seems. Why aren't there 5 million packages available instead of just 5000? Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: Money. The App Store is proprietary software. Furthermore, the App Store has strong incentives to update and release new software constantly. Each new app is placed into a 'new app' view that encourages installation of new apps. It extends their marketing beyond keyterm search and apple's ranking/voting system (which has problems with popularity bias: apps that are popular get more popular because they are popular). Free software (ideally) has incentives to improve existing software, contributing towards existing projects/packages and discourages creating trivial clones of existing software. That is ignoring the clones we make of proprietary software. Granted that a lot of what is offered in the Apple app store is recycled and not very interesting, but it is an ecology that is encouraging some level of participation. My reason for bringing this up in this thread is that I think we could be more packaging-friendly to the newbie or want-to-be developer in terms of growing our ecosystem. A goal of the XO bundling scheme was to make it easy to participate. We shouldn't lose sight of that goal if we want to expand the culture of free software. Maybe a next step would be to put more ergs behind the effort to let children post their work (including software revisions) on ASLO. (If every Memorize game created by every Sugar User were available for download, we'd eclipse Apple in a week. But more important, we'd get a generation of children sharing their best ideas.) -walter -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
Furthermore, the App Store has strong incentives to update and release new software constantly. Each new app is placed into a 'new app' view that encourages installation of new apps. It extends their marketing beyond keyterm search and apple's ranking/voting system (which has problems with popularity bias: apps that are popular get more popular because they are popular). Free software (ideally) has incentives to improve existing software, contributing towards existing projects/packages and discourages creating trivial clones of existing software. That is ignoring the clones we make of proprietary software. Granted that a lot of what is offered in the Apple app store is recycled and not very interesting, but it is an ecology that is encouraging some level of participation. My reason for bringing this up in this thread is that I think we could be more packaging-friendly to the newbie or want-to-be developer in terms of growing our ecosystem. A goal of the XO bundling scheme was to make it easy to participate. We shouldn't lose sight of that goal if we want to expand the culture of free software. I have some ideas and tools that should allow us to go from git tag to a built rpm in a repository automatically with very little effort from any developer. Basically they create a basic ini type config file and when a release is tagged a couple of tools combined pop a rpm out the other end. I'm hoping to have some time to do more of this in January. It should make creating packages even easier than the current .xo format and make the packaging side of things a non event for developers. That and with PackageKit on the client side the whole process from beginning to end should be very simple. Peter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:04 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Seth Woodworth s...@isforinsects.com wrote: Walter Bender wrote: Slightly off topic, but reading between the lines, it seems there is something more fundamentally broken here. 5000 packages. The Apple app store adds that many new apps every week it seems. Why aren't there 5 million packages available instead of just 5000? Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: Money. The App Store is proprietary software. Furthermore, the App Store has strong incentives to update and release new software constantly. Each new app is placed into a 'new app' view that encourages installation of new apps. It extends their marketing beyond keyterm search and apple's ranking/voting system (which has problems with popularity bias: apps that are popular get more popular because they are popular). Free software (ideally) has incentives to improve existing software, contributing towards existing projects/packages and discourages creating trivial clones of existing software. That is ignoring the clones we make of proprietary software. Granted that a lot of what is offered in the Apple app store is recycled and not very interesting, but it is an ecology that is encouraging some level of participation. My reason for bringing this up in this thread is that I think we could be more packaging-friendly to the newbie or want-to-be developer in terms of growing our ecosystem. A goal of the XO bundling scheme was to make it easy to participate. We shouldn't lose sight of that goal if we want to expand the culture of free software. Maybe a next step would be to put more ergs behind the effort to let children post their work (including software revisions) on ASLO. (If every Memorize game created by every Sugar User were available for download, we'd eclipse Apple in a week. But more important, we'd get a generation of children sharing their best ideas.) How would that be vetted or would any bit of crap code be accepted? Maybe we should look at something like what Maemo and Moblin are doing and have garage.sugarlabs.org to allow some differentiation between actively developed and supported apps and the rest. I very much doubt 9 year old would want to support a memorize game and deal with trac tickets for bugs etc. Peter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:04 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Seth Woodworth s...@isforinsects.com wrote: Walter Bender wrote: Slightly off topic, but reading between the lines, it seems there is something more fundamentally broken here. 5000 packages. The Apple app store adds that many new apps every week it seems. Why aren't there 5 million packages available instead of just 5000? Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: Money. The App Store is proprietary software. Furthermore, the App Store has strong incentives to update and release new software constantly. Each new app is placed into a 'new app' view that encourages installation of new apps. It extends their marketing beyond keyterm search and apple's ranking/voting system (which has problems with popularity bias: apps that are popular get more popular because they are popular). Free software (ideally) has incentives to improve existing software, contributing towards existing projects/packages and discourages creating trivial clones of existing software. That is ignoring the clones we make of proprietary software. Granted that a lot of what is offered in the Apple app store is recycled and not very interesting, but it is an ecology that is encouraging some level of participation. My reason for bringing this up in this thread is that I think we could be more packaging-friendly to the newbie or want-to-be developer in terms of growing our ecosystem. A goal of the XO bundling scheme was to make it easy to participate. We shouldn't lose sight of that goal if we want to expand the culture of free software. Maybe a next step would be to put more ergs behind the effort to let children post their work (including software revisions) on ASLO. (If every Memorize game created by every Sugar User were available for download, we'd eclipse Apple in a week. But more important, we'd get a generation of children sharing their best ideas.) How would that be vetted or would any bit of crap code be accepted? Maybe we should look at something like what Maemo and Moblin are doing and have garage.sugarlabs.org to allow some differentiation between actively developed and supported apps and the rest. I very much doubt 9 year old would want to support a memorize game and deal with trac tickets for bugs etc. Peter I think the idea is something more along the lines of a gallery of projects. See http://squeakland.org/showcase/ and http://scratch.mit.edu/. -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 07:13:33PM -0500, Reuben K. Caron wrote: In the sugar environment we have the great resource of activities.sugarlabs.org that children can browse through to add new activities. However, on the Gnome side of things we only have the yum terminal commands. While I realize children can add, remove, and install programs using such commands, it is a bit problematic when you don't know the name of what you are searching for or the actual name of the package you want to install or remove. -Should we include gnome-packagekit to provide such functionality? -Or would including it increase the complexities of managing deployments? Since .XO and .XOL bundles were specifically designed to be safe for installation and removal, I'm concerned the inclusion of gnome- packagekit would allow one to more easily break their installation but I also think it would be nice for children to explore the rest of what Fedora has to provide. Regards, Reuben See another attempt, 0install[1]. I implemented initial code for PackageKit integration to 0install, so via 0install user can install native packages(could be useful if your 0install package has dependency like Qt, which could be useful to install from native packages). Having 0install integration to sugar, we have complex approach - let user install: 1) from native packages; 2) 0install packages if software wasn't well packaged; 3) install/build-in-place activity specific binaries(some python activities have C modules). [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Zero_Install_integration [2] http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=20091204020657.GA25203%40antilopa-gnu -- Aleksey ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 02:55 -0500, Walter Bender wrote: Slightly off topic, but reading between the lines, it seems there is something more fundamentally broken here. 5000 packages. The Apple app store adds that many new apps every week it seems. Why aren't there 5 million packages available instead of just 5000? What are we doing wrong as a community? I have lots of theories but would be curious if anyone had any concrete ideas. (Or maybe 5000 packages is better than 10 apps and all is well in the world?) Well as I mentioned above, I'm working on my own environment thingy. Because I don't want to have to write everything myself, I have had to hunt for the right tool for each job. It is quite the task, it is one thing to say 'I know I'll use standard package X' It's something else completely to go hunting to see if there is something better. There is a _lot_ of stuff out there that is not in repos. A lot of it is crap, but that could be said for the contents of repos too. The proportion of good to bad I'm unsure of. I am more sure that the smaller the project, the more likely that it won't be available as anything but a tarball. Even given that I don't think there is as much out there as there should be. If I have a go at making something there are always those standing on the sidelines making derisive comments and saying 'just use [inappropriate program X]'. I think it's a telling sign that there is no good open alternative to flash. There should be a pile of them each trying different ways to do things, the better ones could then grow into something mature. I could rant all night on this issue. I don't think there is any one problem, I think it's a myriad of things. Attitudes, bureaucracy and just plain difficulty all play a part. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 11:17 PM, John Gilmore g...@toad.com wrote: Good thing we reinvented the wheel here. RPM packaging was too complete and flexible for kids or teachers (or school administrators). I had the same gripe, and then talkedemailed with Seth Vidal and RPM devs. The answer is that olpc-update does what it does really well, and yum+rpm cannot replace it for us. Daniel proposed such replacement a few months ago, and I explained what rpm+yum needed to improve to make that a reasonable thing. Do search the archives. If the yum/rpm + btrfs snapshotting approach works (proposal by cjb, on fedora-devel list, do search the archive please) then it becomes viable. As you can see, we are not sitting on our hands. Without rpm or yum integration with a snapshotting FS, it'd mean a huge effort. Again, see earlier emails in the archive. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org wrote: 2009/12/8 Reuben K. Caron reu...@laptop.org: -Should we include gnome-packagekit to provide such functionality? -Or would including it increase the complexities of managing deployments? One disadvantage of doing this is that it would harm the use of olpc-update -- pristine updates would fail. Would they fail? IME, what happens is that you just lose the package. But rpm does break hardlinks correctly. IIRC, there was a proposal to cache the rpms (or just the names) and re-play the installation after the first successful boot. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 14:54 +0100, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org wrote: 2009/12/8 Reuben K. Caron reu...@laptop.org: -Should we include gnome-packagekit to provide such functionality? -Or would including it increase the complexities of managing deployments? One disadvantage of doing this is that it would harm the use of olpc-update -- pristine updates would fail. Would they fail? Yes, then olpc-update would fall back to dirty update. Daniel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
Walter Bender wrote: Slightly off topic, but reading between the lines, it seems there is something more fundamentally broken here. 5000 packages. The Apple app store adds that many new apps every week it seems. Why aren't there 5 million packages available instead of just 5000? Money. The App Store is proprietary software. You have to buy it, and some of that money goes to the author. People write apps because they hope to make money from it. In contrast, we are reliant on the charitable motives of software engineers, which restricts us to some (particularly noble!) subset. Note that the incentive is not particularly to write _new_ software. You can duplicate the functionality of someone else's app and just hope to grab a piece of the market for that function. The incentive is also not particularly to write useful software; it's to write software that someone will pay for. In terms of useful functionality provided, I suspect Fedora's repo does at least as well as the App Store, and maybe a lot better. --Ben ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
Walter Bender wrote: Slightly off topic, but reading between the lines, it seems there is something more fundamentally broken here. 5000 packages. The Apple app store adds that many new apps every week it seems. Why aren't there 5 million packages available instead of just 5000? Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: Money. The App Store is proprietary software. Furthermore, the App Store has strong incentives to update and release new software constantly. Each new app is placed into a 'new app' view that encourages installation of new apps. It extends their marketing beyond keyterm search and apple's ranking/voting system (which has problems with popularity bias: apps that are popular get more popular because they are popular). Free software (ideally) has incentives to improve existing software, contributing towards existing projects/packages and discourages creating trivial clones of existing software. That is ignoring the clones we make of proprietary software. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
2009/12/8 Reuben K. Caron reu...@laptop.org: -Should we include gnome-packagekit to provide such functionality? -Or would including it increase the complexities of managing deployments? One disadvantage of doing this is that it would harm the use of olpc-update -- pristine updates would fail. And also the software would be silently lost when an olpc-update happens, which is now something we're automating in various places. I think it shouldn't be included in the build although it can remain an option for deployments to add it. Daniel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Dec 8, 2009, at 4:52 AM, Daniel Drake wrote: 2009/12/8 Reuben K. Caron reu...@laptop.org: -Should we include gnome-packagekit to provide such functionality? -Or would including it increase the complexities of managing deployments? One disadvantage of doing this is that it would harm the use of olpc-update -- pristine updates would fail. And also the software would be silently lost when an olpc-update happens, which is now something we're automating in various places. I think it shouldn't be included in the build although it can remain an option for deployments to add it. Yes, good point. Thanks for the reminder. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
Neil, Thanks for bringing this up. It looks like this could be of some value to deployments and something they could easily add should they choose to customize their build image. Keep up the good work and let us know how development is going. Regards, Reuben On Dec 7, 2009, at 7:54 PM, Neil Graham wrote: On Mon, 2009-12-07 at 19:13 -0500, Reuben K. Caron wrote: Since .XO and .XOL bundles were specifically designed to be safe for installation and removal, I'm concerned the inclusion of gnome- packagekit would allow one to more easily break their installation but I also think it would be nice for children to explore the rest of what Fedora has to provide. Perhaps this is something for Zeroinstall http://0install.net/ . ZeroInstall allows for installation of software as a user so you can do things without making system level changes. I'm working on a setup for the XO that can give you a custom environment. The entire thing goes into $HOME. I uses Zeroinstall to grab everything as needed, even the window manager. In practice the bundle comes with the window manager but that is merely as a pre- filled zeroinstall cache entry. Because everything is done at the user level, it is very hard to break things, but it still allows users to have a great deal of flexibility with their system. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
One disadvantage of doing this is that it would harm the use of olpc-update -- pristine updates would fail. And also the software would be silently lost when an olpc-update happens, which is now Good thing we reinvented the wheel here. RPM packaging was too complete and flexible for kids or teachers (or school administrators). They're so much better off NOT being able to install any of 5,000 packages freely contributed by talented programmers all over the world. John :-( ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 02:17:10PM -0800, John Gilmore wrote: One disadvantage of doing this is that it would harm the use of olpc-update -- pristine updates would fail. And also the software would be silently lost when an olpc-update happens, which is now Good thing we reinvented the wheel here. RPM packaging was too complete and flexible for kids or teachers (or school administrators). They're so much better off NOT being able to install any of 5,000 packages freely contributed by talented programmers all over the world. Yes, it would have been much better to contribute to RPM development in a way that would support rollback to previous version (with the square game key), and gradual download and update that is only committed on reboot. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 5:17 PM, John Gilmore g...@toad.com wrote: One disadvantage of doing this is that it would harm the use of olpc-update -- pristine updates would fail. And also the software would be silently lost when an olpc-update happens, which is now Good thing we reinvented the wheel here. RPM packaging was too complete and flexible for kids or teachers (or school administrators). They're so much better off NOT being able to install any of 5,000 packages freely contributed by talented programmers all over the world. Slightly off topic, but reading between the lines, it seems there is something more fundamentally broken here. 5000 packages. The Apple app store adds that many new apps every week it seems. Why aren't there 5 million packages available instead of just 5000? What are we doing wrong as a community? I have lots of theories but would be curious if anyone had any concrete ideas. (Or maybe 5000 packages is better than 10 apps and all is well in the world?) -walter John :-( ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 1.5 - gnome-packagekit?
On Mon, 2009-12-07 at 19:13 -0500, Reuben K. Caron wrote: Since .XO and .XOL bundles were specifically designed to be safe for installation and removal, I'm concerned the inclusion of gnome- packagekit would allow one to more easily break their installation but I also think it would be nice for children to explore the rest of what Fedora has to provide. Perhaps this is something for Zeroinstall http://0install.net/ . ZeroInstall allows for installation of software as a user so you can do things without making system level changes. I'm working on a setup for the XO that can give you a custom environment. The entire thing goes into $HOME. I uses Zeroinstall to grab everything as needed, even the window manager. In practice the bundle comes with the window manager but that is merely as a pre-filled zeroinstall cache entry. Because everything is done at the user level, it is very hard to break things, but it still allows users to have a great deal of flexibility with their system. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
