Re: How not to release software
September 8th, 2009 - SeverinThis is a response to the three comments on the How not to release software post. I originally intended to write this as a comment, but as more as the text grew, the more I thought about turning it into a stand-alone post:
Thanks alot everyone for the kind words. 
It’s probably not right to say that LottaNZB is my very own project since Sander is the original author and is still part of the development and also pays the bills for lottanzb.org (big thanks to him for this). Being involved in several other interesting programming projects (mostly Android-based) he hasn’t been contributing to the code base for a while. I really hope that I didn’t scare him away because of my tendency to rewrite code over and over again, may be because I’m an aesthet both when it comes to code and UI design.
This leads me to history of me and Linux. It started when I switched from Windows Vista to Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 2 about one and a half year ago. I never looked back. The free software community has turned out to be the world I was looking for and didn’t know of for years! A world of openness, collaboration, sharing and friendship. After I started to work on LottaNZB as a complete beginner to Linux programming, my knowledge about the whole Linux ecosystem grew as LottaNZB as an application got more professional… and vice versa. And it even greatly improved my English. 
It’s great to see that people appreciate ones work and it’s a terrific feeling to see people contributing translations, filing bug reports, writing patches and sharing their ideas about new features with us.
I’m afraid that after some investigation, I figured out that getting LottaNZB 0.5 to work on GTK < 2.16-based systems like Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 would in fact mean to revert the migration from the deprecated libglade to GTKBuilder. I know that there are quite some LottaNZB users who would have loved to run the version of LottaNZB 0.5 on such systems but I must say that it’s probably not worth the effort. LottaNZB 0.4.1 turned out to be a quite stable release and comes with most of the features LottaNZB 0.5 has to offer. Because of that, I changed the download pages accordingly. I really hope that you understand this decision. This might even provide you with a reason to upgrade the system. 
SABnzbd is definitely a nice piece of software with lots of potential. I really look forward to the day when we’ll be able to announce the release of the first version of LottaNZB based on SABnzbd, but there’s still a long way to go. While the new backend has mostly been written already, what’s left to be done is the UI and all the glue code that’s necessary to keep everything together. What I have in mind is to turn LottaNZB into an application that is as powerful as SABnzbd’s web interface, but with less clutter and the clean and welcoming GNOME/GTK look I love so much.
Thanks again for all your support. It’s a pleasure to write software for you.
September 8th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Heh, I’ll soon be working on my TV-Series plug-in and possibly a schedule plug-in (making use of Sabnzb’s API
)
September 8th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
I migrated from Windows XP to Ubuntu 7.10 and also I haven’t look back…. I was running Alt.Binz with WINE because I couldn’t find a good alternative… Months later I tried one of the fist builds of LottaNZB, but somehow it didn’t work for me and tried other programs as well without luck.. so I kept using Alt.Binz with WINE which work like 80% of what it used to work in Windows.. Months later I tried searching again to see what I could find and I came across LottaNZB again but this time it work great and loved the interface, clean and with all the information that I needed. Since then I been following its developing, but due to HellaNZB’s annoying bugs I am using SABnzbd now but I can’t wait for LottaNZB 0.6 which will be based on SABnzbd
…… Thanks for making this great application…
btw, there’s a typo: filing but reports … should be filing bug reports
September 9th, 2009 at 3:55 am
i just want to express my thanks to the whole team behind this project.
i used lottanzb quite some time and only abandoned it for SABnzbd after i read your praises about it and the plans to support it in the future. since then i am happy to have an alternative to hellanzb, but i also long for the day, when lottanzb 0.6 is released and i can use it again.
keep up the nice work.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
It’s reading posts like this that make those closed and dark windows days seem so far away.
September 13th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Fortunately, I didn’t mix up PyGTK and GTK up in this posts, but just to clarify: LottaNZB 0.5 requires GTK 2.16 and not PyGTK 2.16. This isn’t the same. For example, Ubuntu 9.04 comes with GTK 2.16 and PyGTK 2.14 and runs LottaNZB just fine.
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:22 am
I also migrated our IT from Microsoft operating systems (used one decade) to GNU/Linux ones. Among these systems are Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (on HPC cluster) and Xubuntu 8.04 LTS “Security Enhanced” (a fork) installed on our client/workstation systems. Our perimeter firewalls are running m0n0wall (BSD) at the moment.
Since some members want to benefit from P2P networks for file sharing, which is really a security concern I came (accidentially) accross LottaNBZ when being on Launchpad. I’d like to note two things though which are very important to me as a CTO.
First we benefit from every single backport to LTS versions. As a corporate entity we cannot afford to make a dent every 6 months. We heavily depend on LTS versions for server systems (5 yrs) and workstations (3 yrs). Please take this into account during your continued development. Further security is much more important to us than scalability, stability, performance or anything else. Our operating system distributions are security enhanced already and thus we want to run secure software on them. Can you put more on your website about that?
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:48 am
@J.C. Denton: It’s good to hear that you migrated your IT to GNU/Linux. A wise choice.
Given the generality of your comment, I assume that you also posted in other places on the web. LottaNZB is neither a P2P software nor meant to be used in a corporate environment. But I’m sure that there are Open Source solutions that will meet your requirements. For collaboration within your company, I’m sure that there are non-P2P solutions that are way more suitable.
March 8th, 2010 at 12:31 am
Blogs RSS feed not work in my browser (google chrome) how can I sort it?