[LAU] Ardour3

[Ray Rashif]

On 21 December 2010 02:26, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
> i'm angry because i've said all the way through ardour3 development
> that packaging of any kind doesn't make any sense.

IIRC we've always been telling each other not to upload any
buildscript of ardour3 to AUR, but share them via other means, eg.
IRC. It was an understanding all archlinux/ardour3 users had at that
time and for as long as I know (until now..or more precisely February
which I wasn't aware of) there was no such package in the AUR.

However, I believe that's flawed and more importantly, stupid. What we
end up with in the end is some script that looks almost the same and
does exactly the same thing, duplicated on almost every system that
matters to ardour3 development. Even one of your most useful/prominent
ardour/jack users (he was featured in an article not too long ago)
uses buildscripts because:

1) They take care of dependencies
2) They automate svn routines
3) They automate build routines

And all that in a nice, unaltered way. You surely don't want to bother
your useful users with those headaches, because surely, you want them
to _use_ ardour3 and provide valuable feedback. Argueing that, someone
who doesn't want to go through those headaches is not fit enough to
contribute to ardour3 development, is absurd at best. Which brings us
to:

> i'm upset that someone would give users a 2nd-rate experience by
> making them think that they had received an "important" version of
> ardour3 rather than just another svn commit that will be out of date
> in a few hours.

Our users are competent enough to understand the difference there -
subconsciously. In fact, I believe that kind of thinking can only be
attributed to new or casual users of FLOSS. Anyone who is capable of
setting up an Arch Linux system is capable of using Subversion. Look
at it this way:

You would've received this query even if the user had resorted to
manual methods of installation.

A PKGBUILD is no different from a svn/wget script that prepares the
local system, pulls upstream sources and does a build and an install
run. Have a look:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ardour3-svn/ardour3-svn/PKGBUILD

Surely, sharing that kind of script openly would not be against any
kind of rule or ethic, nor would it be hampering ardour3 development
any more than random support requests from uninformed users,
regardless of platform. So just a warning pre/post-install would be
good enough to prevent unwarranted queries like this. Which brings us
to:

On 21 December 2010 03:44, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
> I'm comfortable with that note. I just hope that people actually read it.

As long as it requests attention, like a prompt for a yes or no, it
will be read in most cases. Else, it's no different from not reading
about ardour3 from upstream sources. While navigating to the following
page:

http://ardour.org/download_full

I was able to get the SVN command for 3.0 without bothering myself
with the details. If, after installing (let's assume someone helped me
with the dependencies on Fedora), I were to face a crash, there would
be nothing preventing me from asking a question on the list, forums or
IRC.

You can rest assured that Arch Linux users don't bother about
"distributions". Software is only "packaged" because it's a necessary
step to maintain a record and system sanity. You can't really refer to
our packaging and compare it to, say, Fedora's packaging. We "package"
almost everything, even our own custom, personal scripts.


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