On 07/15/2012 01:26 AM, Larry Linder wrote:
> On Saturday 14 July 2012 4:28 am, Jos Vos wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 12:32:32AM +0000, Adam Bishop wrote:
>>> Google also supply RPM's directly. See
>>> https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?hl=en&platform=linux
>>>
>>> IIRC Chrome statically links a lot of its dependancies, so there's a
>>> strong chance that the Fedora/OpenSUSE build will just work.
>>
>> Yes, but he asked explicitly for Chromium and besides that, the Google
>> Chrome RPM's are very bad from a packaging point of view.
>>
>> I'm giving talks about RPM packaging and I also have a talk called
>> "Surviving the RPM Package and Repository Jungle".  In that talk
>> I use the Google Chrome RPM as an example of a very bad package.
>>
>> For example, ut has a nearly 1000 lines post-install script, it
>> lacks 73 out of 93 dependencies, it installs 20 unpackaged files, etc.

Its not just the RPMs sucking, that is merely a symptom of a much deeper 
problem with a lot of stuff Google is putting out these days (conspiracy 
theories aside).

The code has strong smells to it yet and the situation doesn't look to 
get any better. The basic explanation is that "our apps are too l33t 4 
Ur librari3z" which is silly, but that's the sort of people working at 
Google these days -- high GPAs and no large project experience.

> What is driving the use of Chromium:  A number of customers want to
> use "Google Documents",soon to be something else,  to store project info that
> is shared between customers system engineering and our hardware&  software
> developers.   What we had proposed is that we give them access to a back door
> on our website but putting files there is too hard for them as they insist on
> using their hand held devices (smart phones) to read, make comments and send
> updated directions.   I call this "real time design" and not a real
> structured engineering environment.    To keep sanity in this mix - once a
> week I edit it all and its a new folder come Monday Morning.   The customer
> is "almost always right" as he is paying the bill.   At some slice in time
> the design&  changes are frozen in time and that is what we design and build
> to.   It is a very different way to work.  In my opinion not very cost
> effective due to customer driven changes.   He just didn't or could not put
> it all down correctly the first time.
>
> I will attempt to build an RPM package for SL 5.7 to suit our needs and share
> results as we get them.   In the mean time we rely on VM Ware 8.

As for your actual data problem -- have they considered using a data 
store that lives within their organization? Hopefully they are paying 
you enough to put up with them. It'll be interesting to see what happens 
if/when Google ditches docs or decides one of them is violating the ToS. 
I've ditched customers for being difficult more than once -- I just 
don't have time considering how many wonderfully engaged organizations 
there are out there.