Developer Experience

[J. Greenlees]

Hi Miirin,

Máirín Duffy wrote:
> Hi Jaqui,
>
> On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 19:56 -0700, J. Greenlees wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I don't understand your line of thinking here, Jaqui. How many (non-web)
> app developers use their app with every GUI toolkit available?
how many rich client apps have you had to chase mass dependency chains 
down with, because the DISTRO defaults were not the same as Fedora's?
what the developer thought was a required system lib, was a distro 
default required lib, and no other distro uses it at all.
oops, defaults for distros just bit you in the butt.

  How many
> (non-web) app developers use their app with more than one GUI toolkit
> available?

and which toolkit BEST suits the needs of their app? oh, hold it, they 
NEED all installed to be able to pick best toolkit.

  I think 0 for the first one, and very, very few for the
> second.

why should ANY distro make it more difficult for a non web app developer 
to have their app work on all distros, or with any gui?
by picking a default gui, you have stolen choices and made it harder to 
have a gui agnostic app.

EVERY choice made by distro development team, is a break point in cross 
distro development.
and, AS LONG AS THERE IS DIFFICULTY IN CROSS DISTRO DEVELOPMENT, you 
won't get Adobe to port their apps to GNU/Linux, nor Autodesk, or Corel, 
or any other proprietary software company.
without these apps, GNU/Linux will NEVER become the desktop for more 
than a few companies.

> I think there is a difference between the desktop environment a
> developer uses vs. the GUI toolkit(s) his applications target, and I
> think you might be confusing the two a little bit. For example, if I'm a
> developer for a mobile device (say for the Maemo platform), I'm not
> necessarily going to use Maemo to do my development work (and I'm not
> sure I could!)
>

ahh, the embedded / mobile developer is a very different creature, they 
have to set a virtual environment up, or have the device themselves to 
do any testing. that means they really wouldn't want to have massivvly 
bloated desktop environment like GNOME and KDE4 as default, they have to 
bogg their system down with a virtual environment.

> All this aside, how about web application developers, who I'd argue are
> really far more common than OS or even rich client developers these
> days? They want a desktop that works and works well for their workflow.
> I don't think they care to choose from the 21 flavors available.
>
odds are, because distros have stolen the choice of default gui from 
them, they don't even know there are 21 flavours available.
they want code generating apps to generate the really badly coded 
websites we all just hate visting from the problems it causes fisiting 
the Dreamwaever/Frontpage/ ECLIPSE generated website.

>> 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.
>
> Having a choice available doesn't mean we get to shirk the
> responsibility of picking sane defaults. Overwhelming the user, even if
> they are a developer, with the equivalent of a 500-item questionnaire is
> not really very considerate :( There is no lack of choice in free/open
> source software. Part of the challenge of making it usable is filtering
> those choices to the sanest / most useful / most frequently-used / most
> widely-used.

B.S. You do NOT have a responsibility to STEAL CHOICES from users.
You have a responsibility to give users choices, to follow the intent of 
the FSF and GNU-GPL, the intent to promote freedom and choice.
[ and on that one, The only thing that would have RMS not agree would be 
promotng GNU software over non GNU software, he would pick GNOME because 
it's a GNU project, KDE isn't. ]
>
>> 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.
>
> You have to.

nope, you do not have to.
you can and should let the END USER pick the one they want.