Bastien Nocera wrote:
It's not the blogging. Blogging more often that the standards
were upped
and that next month's Fedora release won't accept your old AppData is
fine. Blogging every month saying "we changed this little thing" is more
the problem.
Other maintainers might appreciate the early notifications though, as
opposed to learning a few days before Final Freeze that they have to fix all
their AppData for "next month's Fedora release".
As for my opinion, what I consider the real problem is the fact that the
requirements are growing at all, or even that there ARE such requirements to
begin with. For example, minimal screenshot sizes are a problem if upstream
does not deliver screenshots at that size, it means the packager needs to
take his/her own screenshots. And if the required minimum size keeps
increasing, we may even end up with the packager not having hardware
displaying at that size, which will make it very inconvenient to take
screenshots at such a size. I have seen Richard Hughes's extreme padding
example, but the main issue there is how GNOME Software is displaying the
screenshots: It should scale and letterbox them, not pad them on all 4
sides.
The fact that Richard Hughes decided to not show Qt 3 applications is also
bad. Qt 3 still works fine, and just because an application still uses it,
it doesn't mean it isn't useful. (And I guess Qt 4 will be getting the same
treatment soon with the everincreasing "standards", which will have even
worse fallout.) And porting to a newer version of a toolkit, or to another
toolkit altogether (e.g. from Tcl/Tk), is also not something a packager can
easily do. Why should an end user even have to care what toolkit the
application uses? What users care about is whether it does what they need to
do! If the only application that does it is written in Qt 3, Tcl/Tk, or even
Xaw, so what?
Kevin Kofler