Probably because though there is an element of truth in it, it just sounds plain wrong.
After two sentences i thought "he probably works for microsoft or another big corporation", not because it's flame, but because of the attitude to regard this as pure chaos (and having no big plan as bad). I even looked up the profile.
There is kind of a release-plan, not for the whole eco-system, but that's what stable distros are for. So the remark to Ubuntu is right. But it's wrong to mix library-stability with perceived frontend-issues with Unity. Ubuntu still fulfills that role for some apps. And besides that, it isn't necessarily wrong to write new programs against new libraries. They have new features and new bugfixes.
I wouldn't want the ecosystem to stagnate right now. Or ever.
> not for the whole eco-system, but that's what stable distros are for
The problem is that no app dev targets stable distros, but always goes for the latest and greatest from the upstream so distros are constantly forced to update libs and change the base system.
So with a stable distro, you cant get a new version of an app, because the libs of your distro are too old, and you need to upgrade the whole distro just to be able to get that new app you want.
The Linux ecosystem needs one distro (say Ubuntu) to become so influential, that app devs start to primarily target it instead of the upstream. Only then will the library space stop being a moving target for end users, and only then it will be possible to upgrade app1 without triggering an automatic update of app2, which both happen to depend on the same lib. Only then will these useless practices of "packaging" and "backporting" finally stop, and devs will be simply make packages themselves, like they do on windows or osx. Only then will users be able to install a distro once, and then be able to install new apps for 5-10 years without having to upgrade the whole distro every 6 months.
> I wouldn't want the ecosystem to stagnate right now. Or ever.
But with an ecosystem as unstable as the current one you wont get more than 1% of the market right now. Or ever.
Normal users and especially businesses simply dont want to constantly update their systems. Force them to do that, and they simply walk away.
The Linux ecosystem needs one distro (say Ubuntu) to become so influential, that app devs start to primarily target it instead of the upstream. Only then will the library space stop being a moving target for end users, and only then it will be possible to upgrade app1 without triggering an automatic update of app2, which both happen to depend on the same lib. Only then will these useless practices of "packaging" and "backporting" finally stop, and devs will be simply make packages themselves, like they do on windows or osx. Only then will users be able to install a distro once, and then be able to install new apps for 5-10 years without having to upgrade the whole distro every 6 months.
What happens in Windows is not what you're describing; developers are simply forced to distribute their own copies of the libraries (as DLLs or statically compiled) since there is no package manager. What then happens is that there are dozens of copies of the same libraries, most of them lacking bugfixes and even security patches.
The dependency system used by Linux distros may have its problems, but it surely beats ad-hoc dependency management, even if it requires backporting.
Normal users and especially businesses simply dont want to constantly update their systems. Force them to do that, and they simply walk away.
Right. If you use Windows, have you tried counting the number of update managers running in the background, the number of applications that ask you on launch to "verify updates", the number of times Windows Update alerts you, etc?
Windows machines are constantly updating. Unlike Ubuntu, they just do it incrementally instead of once every six months (except for security patches).
But that's better fixed by moving to a rolling release scheme.
I would rather ship an extra copy of all of the libraries than tell the user that he has to update libc6 (and therefor almost all of the other software he uses) to run my software.
Nothing in Linux prevents you from doing so. Just ship your application with it and use a one line shell script to run it with the appropriate LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
It's just not commonly done (with exceptions like http://sta.li/), and as a user, I'm thankful for that.
The bigger development teams don't focus on a single distro, as their development base is probably diverse enough to demand a certain degree of platform compatibility.
However, many of the smaller development teams will focus almost exclusively on Ubuntu, as it is the distro they will most likely have.
I know, from my own limited experience, that I have only ever attempted to make my systems work on Ubuntu and just allowed others to push their changes into the main development if they have specific platform that they prefer to use.
I wouldnt say that's true. LedgerSMB 1.3 when it shipped last year supported PostgreSQL 8.3 and higher, Perl 5.8, etc... 1.4 will probably require Perl 5.10 and PostgreSQL 8.4...... We specifically target older versions to make it easy for adoption.
In fact, usually when we run into problems, it's a new version, not an old one.
> The Linux ecosystem needs one distro (say Ubuntu) to become so influential, that app devs start to primarily target it instead of the upstream.
This used to be RedHat: software for Linux would often come as either 1) source code (if open), 2) a crazy .sh install script, and 3) an RPM package for RedHat 5.
After two sentences i thought "he probably works for microsoft or another big corporation", not because it's flame, but because of the attitude to regard this as pure chaos (and having no big plan as bad). I even looked up the profile.
There is kind of a release-plan, not for the whole eco-system, but that's what stable distros are for. So the remark to Ubuntu is right. But it's wrong to mix library-stability with perceived frontend-issues with Unity. Ubuntu still fulfills that role for some apps. And besides that, it isn't necessarily wrong to write new programs against new libraries. They have new features and new bugfixes.
I wouldn't want the ecosystem to stagnate right now. Or ever.