[IAEP] XO Special interest group at Sugar Labs

[Daniel Drake]

2009/9/22 David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org>:
> 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.

Is this a criticism? Are you proposing changing this?

>  I believe that the XO SIG could help generate interest
> and attract more developers and testers to the project.

That would be excellent. I'd encourage you to go ahead and create it
so that these resources can start flowing.

I don't think you need to say that F11-for-XO1 is "part of the XO SIG"
-- the fact is that we all have the same goals, and Steven isn't going
to reject help from anyone. This is the same way that the Fedora OLPC
SIG was set up to help OLPC - it provides valuable assistance on
various fronts but the actual "product" was still quite firmly under
the OLPC roof.

If you do want to formalise things and say "this is now a Sugar
project," then that could be done at any point, but this should not be
a barrier to getting people involved right now.

> Would it be useful if we started by combining your work and Stevens
> into an automatic build system.  This could help identify breakages.
> By creating the daily builds and widely broadcasting the various
> releases, we can engage a larger community of testers.

The build system would be trivial to automate, and I'd encourage you
to do it as an exercise.
Coordinated testing and a release cycle would of course be very
beneficial to achieving the same quality of release as OLPC has done
previously. It would be of value if you were to set that up. However,
at this stage, I feel that both of those things would be severely
hampered by the slow development pace. I would instead suggest that
you focus on bringing in developers and technical resources at this
point in time, leaving testing and release planning for a little later
down the line.

Thanks for your efforts!

Daniel