DavidFourer
July 20th, 2009, 03:23 PM
I'm looking for advice on choosing currently maintained, quality, open source software.
Learning to use software can be a big investment in time. Sometimes that knowledge is easily transferable to other software, and sometimes not. So I think it's important to make a careful decision before deciding to use, say, GIMP, or Inkscape, or Open Office, or anything else.
I just spent a couple of hours trying to decide on a web page creation tool. The first thing I learned is -- don't trust product web sites. They look slick but may not have been updated in years. I'm reading this great product web page and I gradually figure out that no one has touched this site, or the product, in years.
Eventually I figured out that I can check http://sourceforge.net/ and get some brief development history and the following information:
Activity (%) * Rank (%) * Registered (date) * Latest File (date) * Downloads (#)
Exactly how to use these statistics, I'm not sure. At least I can look up a product by name on SourceForge, and the information has a date.
Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope comes with one web site development tool installed, and it's called "Screem". I take that as a tip that it's a good choice. However, Screem seems to be for serious web developers. I would have to spend some time studying it. Also, the Screem documentation seems a bit brief for a beginner learning how to make a web page. I am making very simple web pages, to display my vacation photos, and I am not sure it is the right tool for my job.
A product I am likely to use has had a really shaky history. Actually I have used it before. It started as Mozilla Composer a few years ago, which morphed into NVU, which also stopped development and became KompoZer, which seems to be in current development. From the SourceForge.net page I found this information on KompoZer:
There are two branches for KompoZer:
* KompoZer 0.7.x (current: 0.7.10) is considered as stable, though it doesn’t work any more with recent Linux distros.
* KompoZer 0.8.x (current: 0.8a4) is in development: we don’t recommend this version for production use, but if you want to help us please use this one and report all the bugs you find.
That doesn't sound promising.
I decided to check if it's Canonical-maintained software (Main repository) or community maintained (Universe), I looked up both Screem and KompoZer in Synaptic Package Manager and read the descriptions. The last line in each description reads:
Scream
Canonical provides critical updates for screem until October 2010.
KompoZer
Canonical does not provide updates for KompoZer. Some updates may be provided by the Ubuntu community.
So Canonical decided to maintain Screem, but not KompoZer for some reason, but not necessarily because KompoZer isn't good. Canonical can't maintain everything, of course.
Any comments or suggestions?
Learning to use software can be a big investment in time. Sometimes that knowledge is easily transferable to other software, and sometimes not. So I think it's important to make a careful decision before deciding to use, say, GIMP, or Inkscape, or Open Office, or anything else.
I just spent a couple of hours trying to decide on a web page creation tool. The first thing I learned is -- don't trust product web sites. They look slick but may not have been updated in years. I'm reading this great product web page and I gradually figure out that no one has touched this site, or the product, in years.
Eventually I figured out that I can check http://sourceforge.net/ and get some brief development history and the following information:
Activity (%) * Rank (%) * Registered (date) * Latest File (date) * Downloads (#)
Exactly how to use these statistics, I'm not sure. At least I can look up a product by name on SourceForge, and the information has a date.
Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope comes with one web site development tool installed, and it's called "Screem". I take that as a tip that it's a good choice. However, Screem seems to be for serious web developers. I would have to spend some time studying it. Also, the Screem documentation seems a bit brief for a beginner learning how to make a web page. I am making very simple web pages, to display my vacation photos, and I am not sure it is the right tool for my job.
A product I am likely to use has had a really shaky history. Actually I have used it before. It started as Mozilla Composer a few years ago, which morphed into NVU, which also stopped development and became KompoZer, which seems to be in current development. From the SourceForge.net page I found this information on KompoZer:
There are two branches for KompoZer:
* KompoZer 0.7.x (current: 0.7.10) is considered as stable, though it doesn’t work any more with recent Linux distros.
* KompoZer 0.8.x (current: 0.8a4) is in development: we don’t recommend this version for production use, but if you want to help us please use this one and report all the bugs you find.
That doesn't sound promising.
I decided to check if it's Canonical-maintained software (Main repository) or community maintained (Universe), I looked up both Screem and KompoZer in Synaptic Package Manager and read the descriptions. The last line in each description reads:
Scream
Canonical provides critical updates for screem until October 2010.
KompoZer
Canonical does not provide updates for KompoZer. Some updates may be provided by the Ubuntu community.
So Canonical decided to maintain Screem, but not KompoZer for some reason, but not necessarily because KompoZer isn't good. Canonical can't maintain everything, of course.
Any comments or suggestions?