[IAEP] Topics & deliverables from Marketing IRC meeting 03-03-2009: Sugar 8.4 launch date set!

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 01:00:13PM +0100, Sean DALY wrote:
>Extremely informative Morgan, many thanks indeed. I am confused!

Marvellous introduction to your controversial proposal :-)


>can we please consider a cleaner, more comprehensible numbering system 
>with this release? Parent- and teacher-facing, easily understandable? 
>And which could minimize impact on the developer/deployment/package 
>side?

>As a fairly basic user of Sugar on the XO (I G1G1'd these past two 
>years), I have never understood the mysteries of version numbering 
>aside from the "build number". I am pretty sure I have "build 767" on 
>my XOs, but if you were to ask me today what version of Sugar I have, I 
>would say it is either 8.2 or 0.82, I don't know which, except 
>developers prefer talking about "0.82". I'm really worried now about 
>communicating just what version is coming out to teachers and parents.

Changing to a nicer looking (i.e. non-.0-prefixed) version number for 
Sugar won't help the problem you describe above:

You use a machine, tied to a distro, tied to a desktop, tied to various 
applications.

Your machine comes with a pre-installed distro. Other distros might work 
too on same hardware - some might even work better.

Your distro (the preinstalled one or another one you've switched to) 
limits what desktop you can run atop of it.

Your desktop limits what (versions of) activities you can run.


What a user typically can comprehend is not even the numbers, but catchy 
nicknames, like "I run Sugar 0.82 on Debian Lenny at my Apple MacBook".

If you were too confused to say "I run Sugar 0.82 on OLPC-OS 8.2 at my 
G1G1 XO" before, then bumping Sugar to 1.4 won't help that.



>Now, if this proposal seems too radical a change, I'm all ears for how 
>to improve what we have and dispel the fog. I think we can agree the 
>existing numbering system is very confusing and will leave v1.0 much 
>further in the future than it should be...

Leave the numbering scheme for now. I see you point but don't find it 
urgent.

Let's find a well of names tied to our concept, and pick a specific one 
for this current release, instead, to diminish the unfriendly number to 
end users.

Proposal: Sugar 0.82 "Chocolate"



  - Jonas

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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