OK - thanks to everyone who shared their stories about why they haven't
always upgraded to new Ubuntu releases right away. As software
developers we tend to live on the bleeding edge (I myself been running
the Natty alpha for the last month or so) but it's good for us to keep
in mind that operating system upgrades can be disruptive or even risky,
and many users don't choose to upgrade so often.
As I've pointed out, Shotwell is relatively generous in that we do
support some previous releases of GNOME and the corresponding
distribution releases. (Core GNOME applications are not like that. If
you want to run the latest gedit or Totem this spring, you'll need to
run Fedora or another distribution that is moving to GNOME 3 now, unlike
Ubuntu). We'll officially support Shotwell 0.9 (and the next release
0.10) only on Maverick and higher in the Ubuntu world, but if Martin or
other community members want to backport to Lucid then we applaud their
efforts.
adam
On 03/21/2011 07:01 PM, David Velazquez wrote:
Adam, just to give my 2 cents. The reasons why I'm still hanging with the
LTS (at least on one computer) are a few, but important enough to keep me
from upgrading.
The first is, quite simply, as good as Ubuntu have made the upgrading from
release to release it's still not good enough. Every time I attempt an
upgrade it either fails for some reason or gives me odd, undesirable
behavior afterwards which ends up causing me to reinstall anyway. So in my
case the only real way for me to upgrade my release would be a complete
reinstall every six months which, in and of itself, isn't bad. It's the
hours of tweaking and getting things to where I like them afterwards that's
the hard part. I think that speaks for myself. In fact, Linux Mint whilst
having an in place upgrade option like Ubuntu still advise people to
reinstall because of the risks inherent with the upgrade process. The only
difference between those two is that Ubuntu pretends the upgrade process is
fool proof while Linux Mint errs on the side of caution.
I also maintain my girlfriends Ubuntu 10.04 laptop which is on the other
side of the United States from me. As good as she's getting she's still
quite wary of installing from scratch and because of the issues with
upgrading I've had with my machines I've advised her against doing an in
place upgrade since she needs the machine for school. Ditto for my parents,
except they're much closer.
Those are the two biggest reasons I have for not jumping ship every six
months. Another smaller one has to do with the inevitable bugs introduced
with each new release. For instance, in 10.04 I was one of the hundreds (if
not more) that suffered from the Plymouth + Nvidia bug that garnered some
widespread attention. I found a suitable workaround that kept me happy and
I'm still not in the mood to upgrade only to find that it was not fixed (I
don't think it was, actually) and that my workaround doesn't work. Not to
mention whatever other tiny bugs need to be found and then worked around.
In my situation, 10.10 had very little to offer over 10.04 in benefits but
many more risks.
On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 1:20 PM, Martin Wimpress<
[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Adam,
On Mon, 21 Mar 2011 06:03:14 -0700, Adam Dingle wrote:
Your backporting efforts are impressive - it's clear that some users
are interested in running newer versions of Shotwell on Lucid and this
is helping them out, so thanks.
Thanks, I've only been doing the packaging and PPA thing for a couple of
days. So far, so good :-)
I am curious, however: why are you and others so interested in
continuing to run Lucid rather than simply updating to Maverick? Is
it because Lucid is marked as a long-term-support release, or because
there was some change in Maverick you didn't like, or something else?
Obviously everyone's situation is unique, but Ubuntu has made it
pretty painless to upgrade so I'm honestly a little surprised that so
many people who want to use the very latest Shotwell releases want to
hold back on upgrading Ubuntu itself.
When the first Ubuntu LTS release came along I conveniently forgot
everything I knew about Windows and as family members wanted their computers
fixing they were migrated to Ubunutu LTS ;-) My family members only run the
current LTS, therefore they are all on Lucid. I always run the current
release, so I am now on Maverick and soon to be Natty.
My wife and I have a shared Dropbox account into which I have sym-linked
~/.shotwell so we can share the same photo album database and both add new
pictures of our daughter to a shared Shotwell installation. This works
great, right up to the point I upgraded to Maverick and got Shotwell 0.8.1
and my wife was still running 0.7.2. Database breakage :-(
So my motivation for back porting Shotwell was to save my marriage ;-) I
also did it because I was interested to learn the back porting process and I
thought a Lucid version of Shotwell would be of value to other Lucid users.
When I saw that ticket saying it wasn't simple I thought that was challenge
enough to have a go :-) I love Shotwell and wanted to give a little
something back so I asked the nice people at OMG! Ubuntu! to post an article
about my Shortwell 0.8.1 back port and they duely obliged.
-
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/03/shotwell-0-8-1-for-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-users/
I also set the desktop standards at my work. Our workstation policy is LTS,
so everyone is on Lucid. I imagine other organisations do the same.
Shotwell only requires libraw 0.9. We encourage people to use newer
libraw releases, though, since there have been many improvements and
bug fixes since 0.9.
I've back ported libraw 0.13.1 from Debian Wheezy and am waiting on the
outcome of the following ticket before I release a non-experimental Shotwell
0.9.0 build based on a newer libraw library.
- http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2583
I have built svn 2775 of Shotwell for Lucid earlier today and libraw 0.13.1
builds for Lucid, Maverick and Natty. They are all currently sitting in my
Experimental PPA.
- https://launchpad.net/~flexiondotorg/+archive/experimental
Todays build of Shotwell now uses the Vala Team PPA as a build dependency
since they've now published 0.11.7 so no need to maintain my own back port
any longer. I believe it would be trivial for the Yorba PPA to provide Lucid
versions of Shotwell 0.9.0 when you release it. I'd be glad to help with
that if required.
--
Regards, Martin.
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