Comment 10 for bug 1899029

If you have a new bug to report, please open a new ticket.

On the topic of a PPA, I don't think it's Kovid's responsibility to
learn how distro packaging works, in this case Debian/Ubuntu packaging.

You're vastly oversimplifying things.
It's *not* easy. Debian packaging is optimized to make it easy for
debian maintainers to maintain tens of thousands of packages, but in a
way that makes it extremely hard to learn how to do it unless you're
already an expert.

Furthermore, why Debian/Ubuntu specifically? Maybe he should provide
packages for a dozen other distros too? Figure out exactly what's wrong
with the distro package, solve it, and instead of getting the distro to
fix things, provide alternative builds?

Who is going to test the system library integrations?

Why can't you just ask the Ubuntu maintainers to "provide a working PPA"
except they could even do it in their official repos?

No. This is not the job of software developers. In fact, let me put on
my distro developer hat for a moment, and state for the record:

It is better for:
- distros
- users
- software developers

if the software developer focuses on his are of expertise, writing the
software, and distros focus on their area of expertise, distributing the
software.

http://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/

...

Addendum: In some cases, software developers provide one universal
binary that works everywhere, but doesn't integrate with the distro.
This is great: users can update ahead of their distro and get something
generally guaranteed to work, but the software developer doesn't need to
spend *all his time* fighting with distribution. Instead, he could add
features to the program.

calibre does this. Be happy you have what you have.

Instead of asking for Kovid to provide you with PPAs, I encourage you to
submit a bug report to your distro.