[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

[Aleksey Lim]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 02:01:18PM +0000, Gary C Martin wrote:
> On 15 Dec 2009, at 13:36, Aleksey Lim wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 10:52:56AM -0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> >> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 04:07, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> >>> * implementing Zero Sugar initiative, in my mind, is providing
> >>>  "fishing-rod" for developers/doers instead of "feeding" users
> >>>  thus has prime priority
> >> 
> >> I don't see things so black and white. I have been working on this
> >> same problem for a while now (view source key, extensions, etc) and
> >> our users are taking advantage of at least the extensions facility. We
> >> are going to see patches very soon for keybindings, device icons and
> >> control panel sections. And that code can be already deployed without
> >> waiting for upstreaming because of the extensions mechanism.
> >> 
> >> So _today_ we have empowered users that are deploying shell extensions
> >> without disrupting the rest of the shell, and simultaneously are
> >> working with the community and sharing the fruit of their work.
> >> 
> >> The technical part has been in place since a year ago, but the trigger
> >> for this to happen has been actually social interaction. There's no
> >> point in making our platform super-hackable if we don't work as well
> >> in the non-technical part of the problem.
> > 
> > Just to be clear, the technical part of Zero Sugar is
> > http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Services
> > its not something huge, just a set of declared rules how to work with
> > external(to activity or SP) dependencies. Code is ready for first
> > release usage and I'm going to spend this week(and looks like next) to
> > prepare proper docs/tutorials/infrastructure and remove blobs from all
> > ASLO activities.
> 
> Woooaaahhh... Removing binary blobs from all ASLO activities!?
> 
> Now I'm no fan of having to include a binary blob (I avoid it if I have any choice), but Sugar is not targeted at an environment of always on internet cloud computing. An activity must be a self contained, sharable bundle for 99% of our users, needing no downloads of eternal resources at first run/install. I'm most happy to see some smooth fallback mechanism for the 1% running some hokey-pokey hardware/software platform, but resources (binary or otherwise) for our majority use cases should live inside activity bundles.

Well, our major repository is still ASLO

And there is also proposal to support offline mode
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Zero_Install_integration#Support_offline_mode

Having these improvements in shell

* we don't lose "one download from ASLO, geting self contained budnle"
  just have freedom to disable offline mode when user have internet
  (and getting all benefits like online updates)

* moreover having 0install featires we can minify disavantages of pure
  net access - someone downloaded 100M OOo4kid package can share
  these bytes for other local users(w/o any servers)

So, I don't see disavantages

-- 
Aleksey