Canonical To Develop Some Ubuntu Features In Private

[Awesomeness]

Now you're mixing features with projects

Don't lecture me what I allegedly confuse when you don't even understand basic English!

Come on, free means also the freedom to develop behind close doors.

I said that successful FOSS projects don't do that (how many times did I write exactly the same without you understanding it?!?!?), not that it's forbidden in all FOSS projects.

The claim was that behind-closed-doors development was common and no it's not. Not in successful FOSS projects at least.

[bug77]

I'm pretty sure the mail said policy but whatever. My main argument that most successful FOSS projects to not do behind-closed-doors development is still true.
WebKit didn't take off until its development was fully opened. radeonhd (driver) and Xgl died because they were developed in private.

Android is the exception to the rule and that's because Google are so rich, they neither need nor want community involvement.

Now you're mixing features with projects
Come on, free means also the freedom to develop behind close doors. Plus, they're a private company, we couldn't tell them what to do anyway. What's the worst that could happen? They can run Ubuntu into the ground. So what? There are tons of distribution to choose from.

[bwat47]

This article is completely sensationalist.

[Awesomeness]

First, if it's not on their web site, it's not a policy. It's a recommendation, at best.
Second, it doesn't sound like they have anything agaist private branches, but something against not rebasing before committing. And that's VCS 101.
Third, easy branching for personal use us one of the chief reasons Linus bothered to write git.

I'm pretty sure the mail said policy but whatever. My main argument that most successful FOSS projects to not do behind-closed-doors development is still true.
WebKit didn't take off until its development was fully opened. radeonhd (driver) and Xgl died because they were developed in private.

Android is the exception to the rule and that's because Google are so rich, they neither need nor want community involvement.

[MartinK]

Running Android apps@PC

There are other aspects as well - many Android applications are designed in the smartphone form factor in mind. While many work quite OK on tablets, stretching this to a desktop (1024x768 -> 1920x1080) might be a bit too much. Basically, you would get either really big icons (if they were specified as % of screen height/width) or really small ones (if their size was hardcoded in pixel). Also any non-vector graphics that gets resized would look like crap - either blurred or blocky, depending on the scaling algorithm.

There can be also issues with text input - but as some Android devices have a hardware keyboard, it might be not that hard to connect the normal input methods to the Android environment. Not sure about more advanced issues though (runtime layout switching, unicode handling etc.).

Regarding touch input - unless your monitor is a touchscreen (or maybe you have multitouch touchpad) you can't use any multitouch gestures, which some applications might be dependent on. But as there are also single-touch Android devices on the market, this might not be that much of a problem as the mainstream developers probably provide fall-backs for them.

And the other way around - forget about using middle/right click & the scroll wheel. No Android applications have any notions of it. Also no on-hover help bubbles due to how touch input works. Some of it would be probably possible to fake back in (simulating up/down swipe on list widgets, long press on right click, etc.) but it would be far from consistent.

Also, your PC mostly doesn't have all the sensors (accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, light sensor, GPS, IRDA, NFC, camera) that actually make many applications useful.

While I'm not saying it is completely pointless to do so (why not do it if it's possible ), I think the general usability of the Android applications running on PC might not be that high.

Things might change if the developers took PCs in accounts as their targets or if more standard desktop Linux libraries and toolkits can be used for writing Android applications (the Necessitas project[1] is already working on this, it is also possible to use Python to write Android GUI applications[2][3] Its just still a little unpolished though. )

[bug77]

I have no idea where. I've only read about it in a mailing list message quite a while ago. The dev of some KDE app had a private branch on his home PC and his merges to master/trunk overwrote changes that other devs did. That in turn broke translations which is why it came to light.
The dev got an explanation that his development stye was against KDE policy.

First, if it's not on their web site, it's not a policy. It's a recommendation, at best.
Second, it doesn't sound like they have anything agaist private branches, but something against not rebasing before committing. And that's VCS 101.
Third, easy branching for personal use us one of the chief reasons Linus bothered to write git.

[Pallidus]

offensive is having your operating system dial to X or Y when you perform a search (on your freaking drive)

offensive is seeing a company so desperate to monetize they will allow their system to be 1. compromised 2. amazon's bitch.


fuck canonical and fuck amazon, vive linux libre free of money grabbing parasites.

[Awesomeness]

Where? I don't see such on the SVN commit policy page:
http://techbase.kde.org/Policies

I have no idea where. I've only read about it in a mailing list message quite a while ago. The dev of some KDE app had a private branch on his home PC and his merges to master/trunk overwrote changes that other devs did. That in turn broke translations which is why it came to light.
The dev got an explanation that his development stye was against KDE policy.

[liam]

"some sexy 13.04 surprises"

That's extremely offensive.

[Pallidus]

"some sexy 13.04 surprises"