Developer Experience

[J. Greenlees]

William Jon McCann wrote:
> Hey,
>
> On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 5:04 PM, Jesse Keating<jkeating at redhat.com>  wrote:
>> Is this development of other software, or development of Fedora?  There
>> are numerous packages and setups that make sense if you're a Fedora
>> developer, less so if you're an upstream developer.  Or does it not
>> matter and we're talking about both?
>
> How do you differentiate a Fedora developer and an upstream developer?
>   I'm not sure being a Fedora developer is particularly interesting.
>
> I guess I don't think most people are interested in writing an OS.
> But seems lots of people are interested in writing apps and dellvering
> them to users.  So I was referring to that: app development.  And here
> I'm not excluding web apps either.  There is a strong case being made
> for html5 as a development platform.
>
> Thanks,
> Jon
My two bits on this particular subject:
The best disrtibution for ANY development purpose would have the 
following criteria:
1) STRICT compliance to the LSB-CORE.
[ after the core, it is no longer a GNU/Linux base, it is a distro base ]
2) ZERO alterations of packages from defaults.
[ a best development distro would not change any included packages 
default configurations to meet a "distro" decision. ]
3) No picking one GUI as the default, ALL gui options needs to be 
included by default..
[ so that any  new application can be tested against use with all of them ]
3a) best is to just go with a minimalist gui as default, G.N.O.M.E. and 
KDE both definitely not viable. they both have very different backends 
providing needed services for a desktop, so a distro that goes with 
either is stealing the choice of desktop for developers / end users.

A Development distro would, by design, have to foster the freedoms of 
Free Software / Open Source Software and let the end user have ALL the 
choices available for ALL application options.

Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, Slakware, Madriva, PCLinuxOS, 
Gentoo .... all fail to meet this, they all pick a desktop as default. 
Every existing distro does.
[ FWIW I personally prefer to use E16 as my gui, even E17 is unusably 
bloated in my opinion. G.N.O.M.E. failed to make the grade with 
"networking" errors on a stand alone workstation, back in 1998, adding 
in the menu bar that turned me off the Mac in 1982 just sealed it's fate 
as non-usable for me after that. ]

and, for development purposes, I usually go with an LFS build, with 
minimal packages over a base system with GUI support. only installing 
those absolutely required by the tool set I'm using on the system.

Jaqui