LottaNZB

A recent blog post about the availability of a PPA with daily builds caused Xgates to question the relationship of LottaNZB with Ubuntu and the rest of the Linux ecosystem. Because this comment encouraged me to write a more verbose response and because I think that it’s a topic that other LottaNZB users also might be interested in, the comment as well as my response are included in this blog post. I’d love to hear what you think about it.

Is this a Open-Source project or and Ubuntu project?

From the looks of the site at first glance it has nothing to do with Ubuntu but then a closer look, Launchpad, Ubuntu bug reporting, PPA builds for Ubuntu, Bazaar and so on….

Please don’t be wrapped up so much in Canonical, there’s a BIG world of Linux out there and so much of your site seems to be only geared towards Ubuntu and you’re going to turn the rest of the Liniux community off thinking all this is, is for Ubuntu and it shouldn’t be like that at all, if this is just an Open-Source project, you shouldn’t be so focused on one distro unless all you are doing is building for them.

I hope you will switch gears on this and appear a bit more friendly to Linux in general and not appear so biased towards Ubuntu. I personally don’t like Ubuntu and there are other great distros out there.

So what are you a Ubuntu project or a Linux open-source project?

Yes it’s silly to be a Fan boy for a certain distro but they are out there and what they use in their mind is the best and some of the others are trash. Just remember that ‘Distro Wars’ do exist this is why as an open-source project you should be looking like you are favoring one particular distro over another, you look like you are playing favoritism to them and leaving the rest of us out.

My response:

Hi Xgates,

thanks for asking this question. I can assure you that LottaNZB aims to be usable for any Linux user, no matter what distribution. It doesn’t depend on any distribution-specific software and if a user encounters a bug that is specific to any distribution, I’ll do my best to fix it.

As a developer of LottaNZB, I also personally maintain the package for Debian and Ubuntu, but each release is also provided in the form of an RPM package for Fedora, which has been created in collaboration with LottaNZB users who prefer Fedora. Additionally, a source tarball including a sophisticated installation routine is provided for all Linux distributions.

It’s not the developer’s responsibility to provide packages for numerous distributions. Firstly, because the focus should be on improving the project itself and secondly, because providing packages for distributions not used by oneself is likely to cause the packages to be of low quality. This is why it’s recommended to leave packaging to those people how know their distribution in detail. And this is exactly what has been done in the case of distributions like Gentoo or Arch Linux. In other words, anyone who’s interested in and capable of packaging LottaNZB for his or her distribution of choice is highly encouraged to do so. I’d be glad to help when questions arise in the process.

You imply that using Launchpad, Bazaar etc. somehow makes LottaNZB a Ubuntu project. I respectfully disagree. We use Launchpad because it provides a multitude of features like code hosting and bug tracking, not because it happens to be used for the development of Ubuntu. Also, thanks to Launchpad, it’s easy for LottaNZB users to translate the application into their native language. As for Bazaar, it’s a powerful, open-source DVCS similar to Git and Mercurial that simply fits our needs. The fact that we use Launchpad and Baazar for the development of LottaNZB does by no means exclude users of other distributions than Ubuntu from using LottaNZB or participating in the development of it. If anyone refuses to use either of them just because they happen to be created by Canonical, there’s no reason for them to accuse the LottaNZB development team of favoritism. In contrary, spreading FUD is also something that weakens the FOSS community as a whole.

It’s true that the PPA daily builds can only be used on Ubuntu and its derivatives. The purpose of daily builds is to get the latest code to users who are interested in testing the upcoming version of LottaNZB and providing bug reports. They only make sense when updated on a regular basis and when they’re installable in a convenient way, i.e. through the distribution’s update mechanism. I currently don’t have the capacity nor the knowledge required to set up such a repository for any other distribution, but I suggest anyone who’s interested in it to do so.

The latest code is of course publicly available through Bazaar, which makes it possible for anyone to give the upcoming version of LottaNZB a try. I recognize that it may be a good idea to add some documentation to this website on how to get the latest code using Bazaar. If anyone doesn’t feel comfortable doing so, I’ll provide a source tarball (which is basically a snapshot of the source repository), just as I’ve done here. I’d rather not provide daily source tarballs because they don’t make it possible for the user to keep the application up-to-date easily.

I hope you agree that lowering the barrier for testing for a majority of LottaNZB users has the better impact on the project’s future than not doing it just so that a minority of users doesn’t feel left out in some way.

I’m wrapping up my response in the hope that it answers your question. Again, I hereby encourage all Linux users to package LottaNZB for their favorite distribution and tell me if and how their experience of LottaNZB on their distribution could in some way be made smoother.

Regards,
Severin