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Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

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Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#191

Post by slgeorge »

gtaylor wrote: post #100
jcastro wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which part was semi opaque to you? We're always looking for people to help and all the packaging, patching, and releasing is all done in the open. I don't think we purposely discourage people to participate, though I can understand getting lost in the process can be confusing.

My impression wasn't so much "opaque" as it was "dreadfully, soul-suckingly bureaucratic". It's been a long time since I looked, so this may have improved since, but it was really hard to figure out what the first step towards helping with packaging is (aside from the triage/testing side).

We release a new version of an operating system that is used by millions of users around the world - twice a year. So there's definitely some rules to ensured quality. And if anything end-users want more quality, as seen from some of the complaints about bugs in this thread!

So there's definitely a community and it takes time to learn the rules. But there's lots of ways to get involved and if you take the time to understand the issues and then have ideas on how to improve the processes you'll be listened to - Ubuntu is ultimately a community.

You can find out more on how to contribute on the Wiki http://community.ubuntu.com/contribute/developers/

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#192

Post by theintern »

raverbashing wrote: post #17
etfb wrote: post #2

That always seemed to me a bandwagon feature, like Microsoft's SkyDrive: they saw DropBox succeeding, they figured it would be easy to emulate, and they learned otherwise when they tried it. The only way this change affects me personally is that it gives me one less thing to go in and switch off when I install a new Ubuntu system, but I'm glad they've got a pragmatic attitude toward the possibility of spreading thems…

Not to mention someone though it would be "User Friendly" to pop up a notification every time a file finished syncing

Dropbox does this for me on Ubuntu?

I think it stems from the 'Linux' way of doing things, which is to give as much information as possible, I like it, but I can see how it's off putting to some people.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#193

Post by giovannibajo1 »

tomswartz07 wrote: post #121
rlpb wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've tried several times to get an 'in' so that I could help with the process, but it seems to me like a 'club hangout' where outsiders are slightly discouraged. :( I think this is an unfortunate perception. There's an active sponsorship queue, and nominated people run shifts to review and accept outside contributions. All contributors need to do is submit a suitable diff, and subscribe the sponsorship team to the…

I suppose I misspoke- I wouldn't say it's discouraged, but as another comment said; it's painfully bureaucratic- it's almost too difficult for an 'average joe' developer to hop in and help patch/test their own software. I'll share my story: I help maintain a 3,000+ node Puppet config for a school district, running Ubuntu 12.04 on various laptops/desktops. Part of our config used XFCE's weather widget on a panel. A fe…

Two things: one, the quality of "developer released" packages varies wildly, so it's hard to make a global policy. Two, a distro means integrating many packages. An upstream package change might be 100% reasonable and at the same time break existing users because (e.g.) of a feature removal that went through a normal deprecation policy for that package, that distro users are obviously not aware of.

Ubuntu is supposed to integrate and add a QA layer on top of upstream packages. Just pushing any so-called stable release of upstream packages isn't going to improve the situation, even if it might in specific cases.

Personally, I don't see a way out. The very fact that a distro is an agglomeration of independently released packages means that there will be breakages like the ones you describe, because every package has its own concept of stable release, development cycle, feature deprecation, old version support, and so on.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#194

Post by etfb »

jodi wrote: post #66
etfb wrote: post #2

That always seemed to me a bandwagon feature, like Microsoft's SkyDrive: they saw DropBox succeeding, they figured it would be easy to emulate, and they learned otherwise when they tried it. The only way this change affects me personally is that it gives me one less thing to go in and switch off when I install a new Ubuntu system, but I'm glad they've got a pragmatic attitude toward the possibility of spreading thems…

Microsoft Skydrive launched in 2007, around a year before Dropbox.

Really? Intriguing! I'm used to MS jumping onto bandwagons late ("Oh, so Netscape is doing well? Maybe this 'inter-net' thingy isn't just a fad. Get Spyglass on the phone.") but maybe this time they had the product ready to go. Certainly they didn't push it as hard as Dropbox did; I didn't notice it existed until I started seeing it activated by default in Win8.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#195

Post by etfb »

skc wrote: post #68
etfb wrote: post #2

That always seemed to me a bandwagon feature, like Microsoft's SkyDrive: they saw DropBox succeeding, they figured it would be easy to emulate, and they learned otherwise when they tried it. The only way this change affects me personally is that it gives me one less thing to go in and switch off when I install a new Ubuntu system, but I'm glad they've got a pragmatic attitude toward the possibility of spreading thems…

This is the first I'm hearing of Skydrive being considered a failure. What is that based on exactly?

Hearts and minds. It's a free product and installed and activated (and pushed!) by default in Win8, as far as I can see, so you can't really measure success, but I would estimate one in three non-tech-savvy people I talk to understand what Dropbox is, and maybe one in fifty understand what SkyDrive is. So I'd call it a failure without too much hesitation.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#196

Post by riffraff »

theintern wrote: post #192
raverbashing wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention someone though it would be "User Friendly" to pop up a notification every time a file finished syncing

Dropbox does this for me on Ubuntu? I think it stems from the 'Linux' way of doing things, which is to give as much information as possible, I like it, but I can see how it's off putting to some people.

dropbox does this for me on a Mac.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#197

Post by twic »

pekk wrote: post #143
ekianjo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must admit that, more than once, an Ubuntu upgrade killed my audio and I had to go and fix it myself. It's really painful that a distro that wants to be number 1 is so broken at times.

What distro do you propose instead that has equally fresh packages and more stability?

Fedora has consistently worked for me.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#198

Post by twic »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #167
Crito wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only differences that I have noticed and cared about as a home user: Yum lets you do `yum search` but Apt splits that off with `apt-cache` (this is annoying because with yum I can just swap out that 'search' with my line editor). Apt tends to be faster for equivalent operations.

I hope one day there's a command line package manager that works with both DPKG and RPM. Something tells me that will expose the real reason people stick with one over the other; remembering the package manager syntax. I feel no great allegiance to one side or the other, there's nothing of real merit I can differentiate them on, the only real result of the split is package maintainers duplicating work.

I have a set of shell scripts which wrap apt, yum, and macports, so i only have to remember one set of commands. They only cover a small fraction of what those tools can do, but they cover 90% of what i do day to day. They were not at all hard to write.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#199

Post by sharpneli »

cones688 wrote: post #74
a124556 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would but I love APT. I'll just stick to Debian Testing.

> I would but I love APT As a near 100% RHEL/Fedora user I am always wondering if there is anything but a material difference between apt and yum? From using Ubuntu extensively a few years ago they seem to have near identical feature set?

There used to be a massive difference. Mostly because debian had apt-get and Redhat had just rpm. That's why we still have sites like rpmfind. Nowadays there is not that big of a difference from end user point of view.

As a dev I still love dpkg-buildpackage way more than rpmbuild.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#200

Post by drdaeman »

derefr wrote: post #158
nitrogen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old photos might go unused for years at a time, until someone is getting married and needs material for a wedding slideshow video.

Is there any sort of "archival background sync" service that encapsulates Amazon Glacier in the same way Dropbox encapsulates Amazon S3?

Do you really want to wait for 5 hours just to figure out you've requested a wrong folder and the photos you're looking for were shot in June, not July?
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