[Dextrose] [Sugar-devel] New Dextrose 2 build: os438dx

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Tue, 2011-01-11 at 12:26 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote: 
> On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 11:19 PM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> > This release of Dextrose 2 is intended for beta testing. Images for the
> > XO-1 and XO-1.5 can be downloaded here:
> >
> >  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose
> 
> Congrats!

As soon as we're finished with this release cycle, we'll get started on
Fedora 14 or 15 with Sugar 0.90 or maybe 0.92. We'll pick the same
versions that OLPC chooses, to maximize synergy.


> > The major highlight in this release is a simple automated updater based
> > on yum which will hopefully enable us to deploy small updates
> 
> Interesting. Any pointers to how it works / design and or src?

It's a very simplistic tool: This was the initial design by Aleksey:

  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose/Updater


This is the actual code being deployed: 

 http://download.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/testing/dxo2/rpms/source/dextrose-updater-1-6.fc13.src.rpm


Our hope is that, with a small data set, yum will perform decently in
the field, even on the memory starved XO-1.

We'll issue updates sparingly, from a deployment-controlled repository.
Even if something goes wrong on 1% of the machines and we need to
upgrade them manually with USB sticks, we would still save 99% of the
work.

Flash filesystems get corrupted occasionally in the field, therefore the
only way to avoid data loss is having good backup/restore procedures. A
fail-safe update system alone is not sufficient.

Another thing I like about the yum-based solution is that it doesn't
require an arcane filesystem layout and home-brew tools such as
olpc-update. One less thing we have to maintain separately from Fedora.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/