Quote:
Originally Posted by zauriel
Why must they cooperate with Cydia? Installer, regardless of repository format, has been providing users with access to apps since the beginning, and suddenly because Cydia is open source, Installer should apologize and then mimic it? Again, pretentious. That's a "mine is better than yours, so yours should aspire to be like mine" attitude.
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Definitely not. The fact that Cydia is open source and Installer is not does not in anyway mean that they should be required to do anything, nor does it means users should care one way or the other about which product they use (unless they are pretentious, and some people are, and that's ok ;P).
The makers of Installer, however,
should apologize to all the people who's time they wasted or who lost sensitive data by continuing to push "BSD Subsystem" as a viable alternative to Telesphoreo, which in turn only exists for Cydia because Installer simply
could not handle installing it, it was too complicated for it.
Barring even the point that so much of it (BSD Subsystem) does not work (which limited the ability for developers to use the platform effectively, which meant applications were more difficult to write and package, which meant that you, the user, had fewer options),
in specific the passwd tool didn't work, which is downright dangerous. The number of people floating around who A) are using default passwords and B) are running OpenSSH is
insane, and is entirely due to NullRiver not getting onboard with Telesphoreo.
To explain this more fully: the war being fought between Installer and Cydia has nothing to do with any interface element any user ever notices. It has nothing to do with searching (a commonly cited feature Cydia had for a long time), and it doesn't even have to do with Installer's broken promise to the community about going open source.
Instead, it has entirely to do with the options available to the packager and the developer, which translates to more and better applications for users. The number of
developers you find who lament the fact that people use Installer is
very high. In fact, many of the developers who write the software you are installing sit around on the Cydia IRC channels commiserating over "how am I going to install this next one with Installer, *grumble*".
An example: I can pretty much guarantee you that, had Installer been willing to respond to developer's (in this case my) needs, we would all be happily installing J2ME games (yes, that's right, the thousands of available Java games for handsets) on our iPhones right now,
via Installer, as I wouldn't have had to waste
months of funded Port-Java-To-The-iPhone effort on dealing with the fact that Installer A) didn't have dependencies, B) didn't support symbolic links correctly, and C) was built on a failing Unix layer that they were no longer supporting. Installer didn't even respond to my (very very nice, as at the time I was a very happy user of Installer; I was only beginning to start deveopment for the iPhone) e-mails.
So, did anyone here notice this lost development? No. Could they have? No. Why? Because this isn't a feature you see in Cydia or Installer if you aren't a developer. This, seriously, is why you see people arguing over silly technical details like what repository format Installer and Cydia are using: because it directly affects what you can support via the installation mechanism. Cydia, based on Debian APT, has 15 years of people trying to install all kinds of random software with it and simply "works" for pretty much anything you need to get onto a device, from a phone to a mainframe.
Regardless, the end of that story is that those "wasted" months of effort went into writing Telesphoreo and Cydia, and now things
work. Does it matter?
Still no: because users aren't using any of it yet, so developers can't start assuming it and deploying their software. Why? Because Installer didn't even want to discuss the project nor thought it was important, which meant that Cydia, an open source project that they could A) contribute or even B) usurp (there's no reason why Installer couldn't just get APT support welded into it in such a way that no one noticed), hasn't gotten as much usage, which translates to less funding for it, which translates to not "looking as pretty".
Luckily, on 2.0, the tables have turned somewhat due to Installer simply not being ready, which means that I've been able to obtain more time to work on Cydia, which has been getting us features like icons (which soon will support icons per package), the source editor (should be out today), and an "Expert" user mode which will hide packages people find confusing.
So, to sum it all up into a sound bite: why should you support Cydia? Because Cydia dreams of (and the developers of are actively spending their time attempting to provide) a world where everyone is playing J2ME games on their
secure phone, while Installer seems content with a world where people get only a fraction of the products to run on a phone whose address book has already been stolen and is probably running a virus. :(
Regardless, I'm going to go back to working on Cydia. ;P (I only looked here as I was trying to find RiPDev's e-mail address, which apparently isn't posted anywhere, and Google seemed to indicate that this page might have it, but I didn't find it. I guess he just doesn't like talking to users anymore than NullRiver didn't. Meanwhile, I was accepting support
phone calls this morning from a guy in Africa...)
Sincerely,
Jay Freeman (saurik)
saurik@saurik.com
http://www.saurik.com/
07-29-2008, 06:16 AM
), and make the interface more user-friendly (I'm sorry to say it, but copy Installer), and you just might have a convert. 
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