Den 21. nov. 2011 12:48, skrev John Rowland Lenton:
For these same three years we have created and maintained desktopcouch, which is a desktop service (and related library) to access CouchDB more conveniently. Because we are no longer going to pursue CouchDB, we will no longer be developing desktopcouch; in fact, if anybody wants to take over, we'll be happy to work with you to make that official. For the upcoming 12.04 the Ubuntu One packages will not depend on desktopcouch nor couchdb in any way, and we'd recommend the distribution seriously consider whether they want to continue having the package in main, especially if no maintainer shows up.
I'm rather dismayed by this, I have to say. First you convince developers to rely on your infrastructure for their apps, and then, out of the blue, you remove key parts of it? It's not the first time, either. One thing is removing it from Ubuntu One. If you can't manage the large amounts of users and data, then that means U1 shouldn't have been taken out of beta and that it in no way is ready for general use. This is another example of Canonical showing poor judgement in its communication.
However, removing support for tools that apps depend upon to store and retrieve data locally is something else entirely. It is incomprehensible to me that you would even consider this. If you want to attract developers, then you simply cannot just remove tools that developers depend upon. Storage infrastructure is a fairly critical part of most computer systems. If you can't rely on that, then how on earth can you expect people to invest time and money in developing for Ubuntu? I've spent months on my app, and now it's lost most of it's value, if not all. I'll have to re-write it from scratch. Should I add support for Unity at all, or might that also suddenly be dropped? This is not the way to create enthusiasm. Except for SSO, the database functionality was the one big USP that Ubuntu One had. Speaking of SSO... We can't know what's going on internally in Canonical, but we know for a fact that it is willing to drop support without warning. This is a very good reason not to rely on Ubuntu SSO for anything. After all, who knows if it'll be there tomorrow? It is really sad to see myself writing something like that. It's what Windows users use as an argument for sticking to Windows.
You're not only making fools of developers, however. You're also making fools out of advocates. As late as yesterday, I wrote about Ubuntu becoming a very attracting platform with focus on phones, tablets, etc. One of the things I wrote about, was the ability to sync databases between your devices, enabling you to keep working even when you're offline. Yesterday, that symbolised the strength and potential of Ubuntu. Today, the same thing symbolises uncertainty and unreliability.
I'm flabbergasted. This is not a wise decision. Jo-Erlend Schinstad -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
