[IAEP] XO Special interest group at Sugar Labs

[David Farning]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 7:48 PM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> For the past several months the OLPC/Sugar Labs ecosystem has been
>> getting requests to provide releases of more recent versions of Sugar
>> on the XO.
>>
>> The leading effort in this direction seems to be the F11-XO1 project.
>> I would like to like to invite F11-XO1 to become part of the XO SIG.
>> I have been trying to articulate the project goals and gather momentum
>> across several groups.
>> 1.  OLPC as a downstream.
>> 2. Sugar Labs as a focus point.
>> 3. Various ecosystem leaders to do pilots with current versions of Sugar on XOs.
>> 4. Various testers to provide user level testing.
>>
>> The goal of this groups is not to _fragment_ the existing efforts.
>> The goal is bring the various efforts together to form a critical mass
>> to help pull this propel forward.
>
> As far as I'm aware there is no F11-XO1 project, I'm aware of a couple
> of different projects to get the latest Sugar releases on the XO.
> - The SoaS on XO which is being run my Martin Dengler in conjunction
> with SoaS and SL (that's where its all hosted).
> - The OLPC project to get Fedora 11 on both the XO-1.5 and XO-1 which
> is being handled by Steven M. Parrish (and Daniel Drake / Chris Ball)

This confusion is part of what I am hoping to clear up by create a
single clearly defined project.

I have heard back from many of the people working on the various
projects. the work flow seems to be:
1. Sugar development team creates platform.
2. Fedora packagers package Sugar... and everything else required to
make a disto.
3a. SoaS takes packages and turns them into a Soas image.
3b. Soas is getting pretty well test via test days and deployments
such as the GPA.
4a. Steven take the Fedora packages adds the XO specific bit and turns
them into xo builds.
4b. limited testing for xo builds.

Because of time restrictions, the F11 on XO effort seems to be
reactive.  They take the output from cjb and the fedora packages and
create builds.  I believe that the XO SIG could help generate interest
and attract more developers and testers to the project.

> Both projects are cross pollinated and use components of work done by
> both as well as myself and other Fedora upstream people. I don't
> believe there's much difference between them as where possible I
> believe most stuff is pushed upsteam. There is no current Fedora based
> project working on this directly due to the down stream projects.
>
> I have my own build that I use but that isn't generally published and
> is mostly to test core fedora for dependency bloat and breakages.

Would it be useful if we started by combining your work and Stevens
into an automatic build system.  This could help identify breakages.
Then we could create a release cycle of alpha and beta and final
releases.

By creating the daily builds and widely broadcasting the various
releases, we can engage a larger community of testers.

david