All About the Apps Goal

[Martin Flöser]

Am Freitag, 23. April 2021, 11:58:07 CEST schrieb Jonathan Riddell:
> https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/release-tools/-/merge_requests/15#note_20593
> 5
> 
> I've little interest in putting lots of apps into app stores without this
> change of culture where app developers take some responsibility for the end
> result.  It would likely end up with unmaintained apps.

After reading through the merge request I have a feeling that you approach 
this in a not optimal way. Change management is difficult.

Like Nate already wrote it is not clear how that merge request is aiming the 
goal and after being asked to explain you give a non explaining answer which 
certainly did not help. Sorry to say.

I tried to think about what I would care about if I were maintainer of an app 
and also reflected a little bit on how I thought about packaging while 
maintaining KWin. My summary would be: I would not care for snaps.

To me snap, flatpak, appimage is just the todays rpm, dep, ebuild, pkgbuild, 
etc. The vast amount of different standards makes it impossible to support them 
all which results in not caring for any.

As an app maintainer I could imagine supporting appimage and/or flatpak. But 
not snap! With the unfree server component and the lack of proper alternatives 
it would go against my FLOSS nature given that there are truly free 
alternatives to distribute apps on linux. Similar my motivation to package for 
Windows or Mac as non-free platforms would be extremely low. Especially as it 
would mean investing lots of time to set it up and test it. Maintaining that 
would be lots of work, especially given that I mostly failed at keeping cmake 
dependencies correct. And don't remind me of how often Ben was angry with me 
for requiring new CI requirements without checking before (sorry!). Now it 
should be cmake, flatpak, appimage, snap, ms store, apple store, epic store, 
steam store, etc. etc. That's too much for most teams!

Given that I think your approach of changing culture is too strong, which is 
why I mentioned change management in the beginning.

My personal suggestion would be to pick a few applications and try to work 
with them to get the tooling up. E.g. Krita, Kate, KWrite and Okular. And try 
to automate. Don't have the application developers maintain all those 
variants. It's too much! Maybe it's possible to get craft to a point that it 
can build for all of those platforms? Maybe it's possible to generate the 
required files directly with cmake? Give the devs one place to add their 
dependencies. Give them easy tools they know. If they have to invest looking 
into how to package for snap they will ask "what do I get over apt?"

Now going back to my armchair,

Cheers
Martin