[SoaS] [IAEP][DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 04:02:50PM -0400, Wade Brainerd wrote:
> Anyway, why are we talking about the effort to maintain a distro?

Because we keep getting requests to look like a distro vendor:

- http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-July/016566.html

- http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO (5 of 6 TODO items
are distro-vendor stuff)

- http://sugaronastick.com/faq/ (I'm not affiliated with this site)

- endless discussions about disk layouts, e.g.
  http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-August/001937.html
  http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-August/007650.html

- endless discussions about where to file bugs
  http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-August/007839.html

I could go on.

> SoaS obviously benefits from all of Fedora's work - just look how
> quickly it's moved from f10 to f11 to f12.  It's just a tweaked .ks
> file and a brand name.

Have you tried building it lately? It's not rocket science but it's
not something I'd want to talk my parents through.

> >> And, we are marketing it with success (cf. worldwide tech press
> > >> coverage, the BBC, etc).
> > >
> > > How many people are using it?  Satisfied with SoaS as a distro?
> > > What's the target deployment size, and what SL support will be
> > > required?
> >
> 
> I see emails from the GPA deployment going by all the time.  Are there any
> deployments using Sugar on a standard distro?  Are there often mainstream
> media articles announcing "package foo available in latest fedora"?

I hoped you would apply your example to my questions:

How many people are using it?
 GPA - 30-ish (I have no idea, really)

Satisfied
 No

Target deployment size
 30?

SL support required
 Tons of emails to IAEP and sugar-devel, Walter, new partition layout
 proposals, new hardware support requests...

How does that one-micro-deployment resource load foreshadow the load
when SoaS becomes what you want SoaS to become?  How can that be
achieved with the current SoaS/SL team?

> To me, SoaS has always been the answer to the question "how do I run Sugar
> now that OLPC isn't providing OS builds?".  It works well, it's actively
> developed, it brings in good press, so why are people questioning
> its value?

I don't see how you think I'm questioning SoaS's value.  As a
contributor alone that would be an odd position.  I'm questioning the
manpower and focus SL wants to bring to bear on it.  I'd like a
statement I can point to when people ask for stuff that's out of
scope, because the email/bug <-> commit ratio is far greater than one
now :).

I'm trying to point out that SL had better have an idea of what it
wants out of SoaS if it wants to invest time in it.  So far it seems
like SL wants to put in (great) marketing and get out a linux distro
that beats Fedora in hardware and community support.  Do we want to be
in that game?

> -Wade

Martin
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/soas/attachments/20090929/eb24bf12/attachment.pgp