[Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On 5/9/08, david at lang.hm <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> On Wed, 7 May 2008, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 6 May 2008, david at lang.hm wrote:
> >
> >> ubuntu takes packages maintaned externally and picks what version of each
> >> of those packages to put in the main distro. the versions of these seperate
> >> packages are almost entirely independant of each other. they then do a lot
> >> of testing and some development of adminitrative tools and ship the result.
> >>
> >> unfortunantly much of the OLPC development has seemed to be against the
> >> idea of having external software run unmodified on sugar, and the resulting
> >> work to get anything running will hurt this model.
> >
> > Again: what makes Sugar different from Linux?
> >
> > The ability to interact *everywhere*, and to share *every activity* by
> > default.  That interactivity basically defines what an activity *is*.
> >
> > Yes, this severely restricts the amount of software that can run on Sugar.
> > But again: the whole world of FLOSS educational software can run on Linux
> > just fine.
> >
> > If we're just (badly) reinventing a new WM, what's the point?
>
> which is why I fail to see the big point of Sugar.
>
> you don't have to scrap everything to write activities that can be shared
> easily.
>
> a perfect example was the suggeation to make the sugarized activities use
> a standard file picker call so that it could go to the journal on the XO
> machine, or to a normal file selecteor window on other desktops. doing
> this would also meant that other 'well behaved' software that used that
> call to the window manager would suddenly just start working right on
> sugar without requiring modification.

This "standard" file picker call exists only for gtk apps. Also,
"working right on sugar" might mean much more than what you think.

You are more than welcome to explain a detailed plan of how to use the
gtk file picker to access the journal. This is the kind of positive
behavior that I expect from all the people I work with (be it in my
job hours or in my free time).

> unfortunantly the concept was greeted with a reaction similar to yours
> (i.e. 'NO, we don't want to run the risk of people using the apps on a
> normal desktop, we need to lock them into using sugar')

Are you sure about the existence of that statement? I don't think so.

Thanks,

Tomeu