Reserving judgment

Initially, my first reaction to this post was: No, no! Fucking NO!

But then I remember the time Cydia first came out, and I thought it would be unfair to judge Installer 4 negatively when it’s just doing exactly what Cydia had done back then. As such, I decided to reserve judgment and see where all this takes us.

I do, however, want to state my disappointment in the “scene.” Why can’t these guys just get along and fucking collaborate? Unless Installer 4 can guarantee that it will have a better distribution backend than APT then I really see no point why they even have to give an alternative to Cydia. Eye-candy/ease of use, while certainly appreciated, isn’t critical; a proper backend implementation is always more important for stuff like this.

This isn’t the desktop arena; these types of scenarios are bad for the scene because it dilutes the collective integrity of the community… even if it’s masquerading as “giving the users more choices.”

I believe I already gave my opinion on the matter in a fairly recent post, but let me expound.

Cydia had to be done because of the backend flaws of the old Installer, if those flaws had not existed, I’m pretty sure Saurik wouldn’t have even tried reinventing the wheel. Now the only thing missing from Cydia is a really nice GUI (and the GUI as of late isn’t half as bad) – and all you need there are good designers to work on what’s already existing – something that couldn’t be done with Installer because the NullRiver folks were just too stubborn to accept a better backend than what they had implemented.

I understand the whole “working hard” on the backend that can justify why Installer didn’t give way to Cydia… after all, it was first in the scene. But now that Mobile OS X v2.0 has become a great equalizer… EVERYONE had to start from scratch – and Cydia was left standing, and had APT already prepped for v2. So right now, what Installer is doing is needlessly reinventing the wheel.

You know what ticks me off the most here? Is when I come to this sad realization:

BOTH systems will have their strengths, and [more importantly] their weaknesses. But ultimately, these two are essentially doing the exact same thing (which is to install applications, only in a different manner). But because of this “choice,” you have developers and repositories of what essentially should be the same community SPLIT because of that. What happens if there’s an application that bombs on one system but isn’t available at all on the other?

This is exactly what happened with Installer the first time around; their BSD Subsystem was a kludge and you got errors in other apps here and there as the new OS builds came out. Replacing it with the Cydia BSD system sorted all that out.

I personally had both installed and ONLY installed via Installer when I knew the application wasn’t available in Cydia – and this is exactly the “dilution” I was talking about; It shouldn’t have to be that way! The ideal is that both groups just put their differences aside and fucking work together.

• Cydia has a superior backend; Debian APT – used in a lot of Linux desktop environments, but has a crap interface by “Apple user standards.”
• Installer has the eye candy and the “idiot proof” usage (very Apple) – but it sucks in the back-end (at least it used to… not sure about now since it hasn’t been released officially)

But given that, is it that fucking hard to just take the two strengths and marry them into one application/system? Like I said, unless the Installer folks have miraculously developed a better backend than APT (which has 15 years of development behind it) in less than a few months, it makes more sense to stick to Cydia's backend and incorporate the eye candy/interface of Installer to it. But hey, I have no problems with Installer switching to APT and Cydia out of the scene. Whatever the outcome, it would be better to have only ONE other distribution system aside from the AppStore.

If the Installer side of the fence can justify the need for an alternative backend to Cydia ¹ because Cydia was certainly justified in its creation way back; If the Installer folks got their act together back in the day, then we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. which is beyond the “eye-candy” argument, then I’ll feel better – but for now, it’s just like a big dick-waving fight where there won’t be any winners.

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But of course, after all this complaining, like I said at the beginning; I’m reserving judgment. I’m hoping Installer 4 would bring something to the table that absolutely cannot be done by Cydia – to justify the former’s existence in the post v2 age.