[tomboy-list] I'm a little confused...

Tue Oct 5 02:07:49 PDT 2010

Hi.

I'm ignoring the mono part of the mail - as I don't see the point.

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Davyd McColl <davydm at gmail.com> wrote:
> A day or two ago, I had a bug, which, as a good user, I reported and which
> has been fixed, apparently
> (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624885)

This seems to be your core issue.

> What bothers me about the .NET/Mono choice is simply this: despite the fact
> that choosing .NET/Mono as a platform would seem to make x-platform releases
> part of the cycle, despite the fact that there is a win32 installer (1.3.2,
> quite far behind the curve: some digging shows that there are a 1.4 releases
> and a new 1.5 release out).

This is where your research failed you. The last published release
(with release notes, announcement etc.) is the one that you used (and
that contains the mentioned bug). Both the tarball on the site and the
msi are for the last unstable release, 1.3.2.
Now - the point that you _could_ make is this: 1.4.0 (and 1.4.1 as a
point release for Windows, to fix the bug that is bothering you right
now) is tagged in git. As far as I understand it should've been
released yesterday, on the 4th of October. Sandy's doing a great job
as a maintainer, but I guess personal life stopped him from doing the
related work, namely
- Announcing the new version
- Updating the site
- Uploading a new tarball and msi (at the same time...)

In other words: There is no (completed) release 1.4.x yet. It wasn't
announced so far, the homepage wasn't updated and no tarball has been
uploaded. That's platform agnostic and no discrimination against
Windows or something.. It probably just means that the (fabulous) guy
doing all the work was busy with other things and didn't have time to
follow roughly these steps: [1]

> At least, these releases are available as
> source, which is great and all, but bear in mind that most win32 users don't
> have a *nix build environment. In fact, most win32 users are starved of
> *any* kind of dev tools, though I suppose they could download Monodevelop
> and friends (or VS2008 and the gtk-sharp stuff, I suppose) and work with
> that. A tad of an overkill for a 2.5mb install-size app to have to go get
> all of that, but it's possible. What would make it more difficult though is
> that the project is set up in good old Makefiles and a configure script.
> Easy on *nix, NOT HAPPENING on win32. I tried. For one thing, my win32 build
> of sh can't fork(), though I'm sure that's the least of my problems. Again,
> perhaps I could work around this with Cygwin, but that's also quite an
> overkill for getting a binary from a project which purports cross-platform
> targets.

Again, I fail to see the point. For one, we're providing the msi at
the same time as the tarball. On the other hand we don't rely on
autoconf/autotools on Windows. Building the project on Windows uses
MSBuild, and is as easy as typing "msbuild Tomboy.sln" if you happen
to have the software around (or use SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop,
VisualStudio Express or whatever. Nothing *nixy about the process
though). Which we don't require, mind you.

> I guess what I'm drilling on about in such length is that Tomboy is a great
> app with great x-platform usage. Pity that it's really only available for
> *nix users, since the win32 build is well outdated and buggy.

I guess this is the part that's really, really wrong. See above. 1.4.1
was tagged in git on the 4th of October, roughly 13 hours before you
wrote your mail.

> So I guess what I'm saying is that if the Tomboy devs can't be bothered to
> make win32 binary releases on a regular basis (and will rather tell people
> to compile it themselves:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631286#c6), then perhaps the devs
> need to re-evaluate their end-goals. Is this to be a x-platform note-taker
> with sync abilities or not? I *truly* hope it is because there's no project
> that I've tried out there which comes even close.

See, this is were I completely lost. Looking at my comment in that bug
it certainly seems to me that I said that you have 3(!) options, only
one of those was "Go compile it yourself/use the source". The other
two were

- Wait for the release

This was promised to be available very soon (yesterday or today) in
the original bug report,
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624885, a mere 10 minutes
after the comment you quote above

- Send me a line if it's urgent and I'll personally provide you with a
fixed installer right away

I seriously fail to see the attitude you are describing here, but I'll
blame it on using not my native language (and on the often ambiguous
text medium).

So, the bottom line from my personal point of view is:

1) Your bug was reacted on in a matter of minutes. You reminded us of
a bug/patch that didn't make the "current" (i.e. the one that was
announced to the public on the Tomboy project site at the time of your
bug report) releases nor hit the git repository, thanks for that.

2) The timing was kind of special, because Tomboy follows the Gnome
release cycle and yesterday was supposed to be a release date. Refer
to [1] to see what is part of a release for us (and note the Windows
part).

3) The maintainer said right away that he supports doing a 1.4.1 point
release for Windows only, again mere minutes after your report and
just for that fix.

I can hardly see a way to react faster/better (ignoring the fact that
the bug could and arguably should have been fixed already).

My long response is kind of a contra-rant, because my setup is just
about the same as yours (swap Fedora for Ubuntu at home, but let's
ignore that) and I'm spending most of my time on Windows 7, due to my
work requirements. I'd argue that the situation for Windows release is
good and stable for a looong time and we (me included) still try to
improve it actively (both the "contribute on Windows" situation and
the general Windows specific(!) "end user" experience).

You have an open source project that originated on Linux and supports
two build systems, one for Linux, one for trivially easy Windows
builds (not for the end user, obviously). That even supports your
Windows 7 jump lists (not my work, but I'm highly addicted to that
feature) and comes with a usable, standard MSI (not some self
extracting zip or 3rd party installer software) for quite a long time.

Please be assured that Tomboy on Windows is one release among 3 equals
(I'd even argue that in the past it was two "equal" releases for Linux
and Windows and one that received lesser love for OS X, partly because
all the things different over there, be it hotkeys, the unified menu
bar etc.. The situation for that release improved quite a bit as well,
though).

The msi that should make the 1.4 announcement can currently be found
at [2]. I cannot upload to that gnome ftp so you're free to either
wait for Sandy/Paul to grab the file and in the right place (probably
_after_ doing the release chore in [2]) or you take it from my link
right now.

Ben

1: http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/ReleaseChecklist
2: http://ben.sh/Tomboy-1.4.1.msi