[math4] testing on sugar

[David Farning]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 9:21 PM, Mike Major<jmikem at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> hi everyone,
> i hope no one thinks these are weird questions but here they are.

Nope not weird at all.

> since i have posted my activity on a.sl.o, i have noticed that some
> applications are marked as being compatible with sugar 0.82-0.86.

One of the ideas within open source is the idea a upstream and
downstream.  Sugar Labs, which develops Sugar, is upstream to OLPC
,which distributes the XO.

A new version of Sugar is release every six months.  OLPC and other
distributors such as SoaS pick up a version of Sugar and distribute it
slightly less frequently.  For example, it looks like Sugar .86 will
be released before the XO 1.5 is shipped.  Even though .86 will be
available, OLPC engineerings are likely to use .84.  Whenever you ship
a product to a few hundred thousand users, it is preferred that the
product has been throughly tested.  In this case 6 month of testing is
better then a few weeks.

The compromise involves finding a balance between ease of development
vs cost of support.  Developers like to release early and often.
Distributions like to release infrequently.

> this is confusing to me since as far as i can tell, only 0.82 is
> released and official ON THE XO. even the newest 8.2.1 (build 802)
> release for the xo has 0.82 sugar on it.
>
> the questions here are:
> 1. it seems to me that listing activity as working on 0.82 only marked
> it as old and i got a warning (from a.sl.o). therefore i listed my
> activity as 0.82-0.86. is this right?

If all of your development and testing is for .82 it is appropriate to
make it as such.

> 2. is testing with 0.84 or 0.86 important, since it doesn't seem to be
> actually on the xo?

Most activity developers are currently working on .84 or .86 machines.
 They either use SoaS or linux for their development environment.

> 3. apparently 0.84 is on SoaS. where is 0.86 available?

Most standard Linux distributors ship .84 as does SoaS.  0.86 is
available via the beta version of soas at
http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/3/

> thanks for the help and i'll probably have follow up questions,

As developer become more involved, they tend to start developing for
more recent versions.  That way their stuff gets more heavily tested
prior to release.

WRT ASLO, when sugar update contacts ASLO:
1. The sugar client sends a string containing the currently version of
sugar and a list of currently installed activities.
2. ASLO iterates through the list of installed activities and returns
a link to the most recent version--that is marked as being tested for
the version of sugar indicated.

You might not see that behavior unless you are running Sugar .86. (I
just wrote the code for it last month.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Sugar_Update_Control_ASLO )  I
think .82 is still hard coded to look at wiki.laptop.org for updates.
Now we wait for the new feature to trickle down to the XO.

Yes, it is confusing.

david

> mike
>
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