
Developers shouldn’t distribute their own software - akalin
https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/09/Developers-shouldnt-distribute.html
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PaulDavisThe1st
"Some developers may complain that distros ship their software too slowly, but
you shouldn’t sweat it."

Our problem over at ardour.org isn't that they're too slow - it's that they
don't get it right. Hence our own distro-neutral package, and our policy that
this is the only version we can support.

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rumanator
Can you provide some insight on what distro's don't get right?

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PaulDavisThe1st
Sorry, this is a bit late.

To build Ardour "correctly" requires patches to some of the libraries we use.
These patches will never be upstreamed, for a variety of reasons (the most
notable: GTK+2 is EOL at this point; next most notable: the patch actually
changes the behavior of the library in ways that that we need, but are
debatable from a general purpose perspective).

By building against the standard libraries, certainly (typically subtle)
behaviors no longer work.

In addition, they get the packaging wrong - not including certain files, not
building certain modules.

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ddevault
I'm late here myself, but it seems to me the problem is that Ardour sticks to
the long-since-EOL'd GTK 2 and relies on non-upstreamable behavior. The bad
actor here doesn't seem to be the distros IMO.

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kayamon
This attitude is exactly why Unix has never managed to attain the same kind of
software ecosystem that other OSs have.

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im3w1l
But why would a distro package software that one uses? And why would people
use software they cannot easily install? You need some way of breaking the
deadlock.

