[Owncloud] Getting owncloud-client in Debian

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello.

On Mon, 2012-10-29 at 17:22, Klaas Freitag wrote:
> On 29.10.2012 13:42, MJ Ray wrote:
> >Jean-Louis Dupond <jean-louis at dupond.be>
> >>Wouldn't it be a good idea to get the ownCloud Client packages in
> >>Debian repositories? [...]
> >
> >Yes.
> Why btw?
> 
> The idea of doing it in the buildservice is to provide the users
> with the latest versions quickly after release, which is important
> to users especially of Ubuntu and friends. We get that feedback
> regularly

Then lets get you some more feedback. :) My story goes like this.

Discovered OwnCloud in its 3.x days. fallen in love with the idea of
finally having control over my data but still using all this buzzing
cloud ideas. Early switched to the 4.x series as I was eager for all
the new stuff. Not really a nice expirience when upgrading but I got
it all back and sorted out.

So I keep doing my stable updates with a bit of fear but so far they
went fine. I was also really happy about the native linux client. With
the forked csync and stuff I thought it might be a bit painfull to
install it from source as I wasn't planning on hacking on it.
Discovered the OBS are was happy about it for sme weeks.

After these weeks my Debian unstable got a newer openssl and
owncloud-client did now longer work. Waited some days but no updates
so I had to switch rebuilding the packages from source to keep them
working.

Next time I remembered OBS was the point as I wanted to install it on
some Ubunutu 12.04 maschine.  Installation worked fine, but they
forced the new 1.1 version. And while I would love to use all its new
features I'm not going to upgrade the server side to 4.5 yet after the
debacle of 4.x and after seeing that the _release_ tarball was changed
after the release with additional fixes.

Don't get me wrong, I like fast release cycles, but breaking stuff in
between does not really look professional from a user perspective.
Sure, supporting both sync mechanisms for some time is a burden, but
it is a burden a small amount of devs have versus the burden of
keeping server and client software in sync for _every_ user.

Summary would be like this a) a distro that keeps client and server in
sync even when staying behind bleeding edge makes sense b) don't break
client server compatibility easily (like it feels this time).

regards
Stefan Schmidt