First of all couple of weeks back, I was able to put out an article about riot-web. It’s been on my mind for almost a month or more hence finally sat down, wrote and re-wrote it a few times to make it simpler for newbies to also know.
One thing I did miss out to share was the Debian matrix page . The other thing which was needling me was the comment . This is not the first time I have heard that complaint about riot-web before and at times had it happen before.
The thing is its always an issue for me when to write about something, how to say something is mature or not as software in general has a tendency to fail at any given point of time.
For such queries I haven’t the foggiest idea as to what to share as the only debug mode is if you have built riot from source and run the -debug tests but can’t say that to a newbie.
One of the things which I didn’t mention is if any researchers tried to get data out of riot-web because AFAIK twitter banned lot of researchers who were trying to get data out of their platform to do analytics etc.
This I sort of remembered as I read an open letter couple of days before by researchers about independent oversight over facebook as a concern as well.
It would have been interesting if there were any new interesting studies made from riot-web implementation, something similar to how a study of IRC I read some years ago. The mathematical observations were above my head but still some of the observations were interesting to say the least.
There has been another pattern I have been seeing in the newer decentralized free software services. While in theory, the reference implementation is supposed to be one of many, many a times, it can become the defacto implementation or otherwise you have the irc way where each client just willy-nilly did features but still somehow managed to stay sane and interoperate over the years but that’s a different story altogether for a different day.
While I like the latter, it is and can be hard as migration ia a huge headache from one client to the other irrespective of whatever the content is. There is and could be data-loss or even meta-data loss and you may come to know only years later (if you are ‘lucky’ what info. it is that you lost.)
The easiest example is contacts migration. Most professionals have at least a hundred or two contacts, now if few go missing during migration from either one version to the other or from one platform to the other, they either don’t have the time or the skills to figure out why part-migration succeeded and the rest didn’t. Of course there is a whole industry of migration experts who can write code which would have all the hooks to see that the migration works smoothly or point out what was not migrated.
These services are wholly commercial in nature and also one cannot know in advance how good/bad the service is as usually issues come to bite much later.
On another note altogether, had been seeing the sort of java confusion from a distance. There’s a Mars Sims project I have been following for quite sometime, made a few bug-reports and for reasons unknown, was eventually made a contributor. They are also in a flux as to what to do. I had read the lists.debian.org/debian-java off-and-on the web and was glad to point out the correct links.
I had read the rumors sometime back that Oracle was bull-charging Java so that it would be the only provider in town and almost everybody would have to come to it for support rather than any other provider. I can’t prove it one way or the other as it’s just a rumor but does seem to have sense.
At the end, I remember a comment made by a DD Praveen at a minidebconf which happened a month ago. It was about how Upstreams are somewhat discouraging to Debian practices and specifically more about Debian Policy . This has been discussed somewhat threadbare in the thread What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users? in Debian-devel. The short history I know is about minified javascript does and can have security issues, see this comment in the same thread as well as see the related point shared in Debian Policy. Even Praveen’s reply is pretty illuminating in the thread.
As a user I recommend Debian to my friends, clients because of the stability as well as security tracker but with upstreams in a sort of non-cooperative mood it just adds that much more responsibility to DD’s than before.
The non-cooperation can also be seen in something like PR, for instance like the one which was done by andrewshadura and that is somewhat sad 😦
Experiences in the community 