Re. subsurface: FTBFS in experimental

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Tue Aug 25 17:55:38 PDT 2015


On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 02:10:06AM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> 
> How saddening to see such a nice program for divers being basically
> destroyed by a stupid and arrogant upstream (and while some may
> consider this impolite, I guess it's simply the truth).

You are entitled to your opinion.
Being called stupid and arrogant is usually not a great conversation
opener, but hey, I've been called worse.

> Especially the assumption to know it better than the rest of the whole
> opensource world and decades of proven philosophy and even claiming
> that this would increase the "experience" for users is just weird.

And because of those decades of proven philisophy Linux has taken over the
desktop, correct? And become the #1 targeted platform of all major desktop
applications.

Sorry, that was snarky and I had promised myself not to be snarky but to
be constructive. So let's strike that last comment.

> Well apparently subsurface is now targeted towards Win/Mac[0] (no
> binaries for Linux)... so the "experience" for FLOSS users will simply
> be that there is no subsurface anymore.

No, we have binaries available for Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mint, and, of
course, Debian. And we have a fully automated build script in the works
that builds Subsurface on many other distributions that we haven't been
able to add to our list. There's an ArchLinux AUR based on that. Etc.

> And a "nice" side effect for those poor souls which actually bother to
> use the upstream binaries or compile from sources is to have no code in
> their system which evades the proper package management system and any
> for of security support.. but maybe upstream donates it some windows
> -like per-program-update-code o.O

So looking at my stats 4x as many Debian users are using the binaries we
provide than the binaries that used to come with the distribution. But as
a matter of fact both of those combined are less than 1% of our user base.

And of course for the vast majority of our libraries we use the system
installed ones so the users do indeed benefit from any security updates
that will happen in the distribution.

> >And the current model that
> >distributions use when it comes to applications and the libraries that
> >they depend on doesn't allow us to do so.
> Probably everyone here is curious about some enlightenment how upstream
> thinks software management should happen! Appstores? MSI installer
> files? All statically linked?

An application should be able to bring its own libraries for those
libraries that it is so tightly coupled with that it makes no sense to
allow random combinations. So today Subsurface prefers to run against our
own branch of libdivecoputer and our own branch of libmarblewidget and
requires the very VERY latest libgit2 (0.23) and libgrantlee (5.0.0).

We link against 107 libraries (today's master, checked on ArchLinux).
There are four libraries that we want to control - everything else we
should be fine with a reasonably current distribution (ok, for Qt you
won't get all of our features if you aren't on 5.3 or newer).

> I really regret nowadays to have spent time on debugging some data
> corruption issues in subsurface logs (which were anyway never fully
> fixed).

So that made me curious. There is a sum total of ONE email from you on the
mailing list, the beginning of which I'm quoting here:

	On Mon, 2014-03-17 at 21:27 +0100, Rainer Mohr wrote:
	> May I ask how you are involved in Subsurface, I didn't find you on the
	> mailing list?
	I'm not,.. but it's opensource any everyone could contribute... not sure
	whether I find the time to actually write a parser, but I've opened a
	ticket some time ago about this and it makes sense to collect such
	information there.

So you opened a ticket and we didn't fix it for you.
I appreciate your contributions to Subsurface. Thank you.

> Anyway,.. thanks to the Debian maintainers for keeping it as long as
> possible in the archives.

Yes, thanks to the maintainers - I appreciate the work that they have done
and I continue to use a big chunk of the packaging work done by them in
order to create the Debian / Ubuntu packages that are available.

> Have you considered to simply build without git support (I love git,
> but using it as a backend here seemed just ugly and I always liked the
> xml file much more) and disable marble?

That will give you the reduced user experience that we are trying to
avoid. You are of course welcome to do that. We would appreciate if you
didn't call it Subsurface if you did that, though.

> [0] And I really wonder which divers from that community are going to
> use subsurface instead of the native dive logs... I know quite a number
> of divers, both tec and recreational, and none from the non-FLOSS side
> uses subsurface; great binary-installer-experience or not.

About 15% of our users are on Linux - this has been fairly consistent for
the past two years during which I have been trying to track those numbers.

And since none of the native dive logs are running on Linux (and the other
dive log software that appears to exist under Linux is, frankly, a joke
and not really usable), my guess is that Linux users are much more
motivated to use Subsurface than Windows or Mac users (where there usually
is a vendor app and of course there are other vendor independent dive logs
available like MacDive and DivingLog).

Anyway, I'm not trying to argue with you. I understand your feelings and
the frustration that Subsurface is violating some of your strongly held
believes. I was simply trying to insert a little more data into the
conversation.

If you have a solution that would allow us to tightly control about a
handful of libraries that we link against that would work for Debian, I'll
be happy to work with you. But given that libgit2 has been deemed
insufficiently portlable and mature by Debian (yet it's the underlying
mechanism that we use for our upcoming cloud storage feature in Subsurface
4.5) I am not hopeful that this will end up being easy.

/D


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