[IAEP] Sugar on Ubuntu

[Morgan Collett]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 06:07, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 7:42 PM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> Over the last weeks I have been looking at how we can improve our
>> release cycle.
>
> Thanks. Next we will need to look at what happens to our product. This
> includes ports to other platforms, packaging (yum and apt), and
> getting improvements sent upstream and adopted.
>
> Of these, I can only comment on Debian and Ubuntu. Three of the
> packages now in distribution are broken. I don't understand how they
> could have made it into distribution with unfulfillable dependencies
> (Write and Poll), or with a flat-out inability to run once installed
> (Write, Browse, graphical xo-get). I do understand packaging
> unfinished packages with usable functionality, such as PlayGo.

I can speak only for Ubuntu, although we are working with the Debian packagers.

The packaging in hardy was done by Jani Monoses on his own. The
activities you mentioned, Write and Poll, depend (or should) on
abiword, and hardy shipped with an abiword that was too old despite
last minute attempts to get the required version in.

That's still the case unless you use the PPA, which I haven't fully
tested myself. We haven't had the resources to maintain this, and
since it's a low priority in Ubuntuland it won't qualify for Stable
Release Updates in the lifetime of hardy.

The best is to use the latest packaging for 0.82:
http://sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Ubuntu#Sucrose_0.82

Jani's no longer able to devote time to packaging Sugar, so in the
last month we formed a team to do this going forward:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SugarTeam

Due to the northern hemisphere end of summer holidays, our initial
progress has slowed, but the plan is to sync the 0.82 packages from
debian, where they have landed in unstable, into Ubuntu Intrepid and
into a PPA for hardy.

We planned to announce the team in more detail once we actually had
the packages in, but the sync hasn't happened yet. Perhaps we need
some more exposure anyway as we could do with more assistance.

> So the questions that arise are about
>
> * our QA process

There has been none. Once we have something to QA, we need people to
help with this in a systematic way.

> * our packaging process.

James Munro packaged 0.82 into a PPA - see the abovementioned 0.82
link. It's his first packaging work, and it's based on Jani's hardy
packages.

The debian packaging is somewhat more mature, so we plan to sync that
over like the bulk of the packages in universe, and QA that and feed
packaging changes back to debian.

> * Who is in charge?

I'm leading the Ubuntu Sugar Team. It's a team within Ubuntu, not
within Sugar Labs. However, I'm relying on others in the team to do
the packaging, while I work upstream.

> I know where to report basic Sugar bugs, and Ubuntu-specific bugs.
> Where should I report bugs in images for qemu and VMWare? AFAIK,
> joyride images won't run in qemu, which complains about 3DNow.

dev.laptop.org on the kernel - that's a known kernel issue, where the
OLPC kernel packaging process can't spit out an ext3 kernel configured
differently from the jffs2 kernel. The kernel guys are aware of it,
but releasing OLPC 8.2 is clearly a higher priority for them.

Regards
Morgan