[SoaS] Planning towards SoaS v3

[Peter Robinson]

Hi All,

I'm sure Sebastian has already emailed about this subject but with SoaS 3
been approved as a Fedora 13 feature and myself being a co-maintainer with
Sebastian I thought I'd put my point forward as to what I would like to see
happening and what I'll be working towards in the next release. So the major
things I can see for SoaS3 are as follows:
1) all upstream in Fedora
2) rpm packaged activities
3) Sugar 0.88
4) boot helper is dead and buried

So 1 and 3 aren't overly controversial. 1 is a requirement of being able to
use all the lovely upstream Fedora infrastructure and will generally make
life easier for the SoaS maintainers. 3 is a given :-D 2 has various
opinions but that's not part of this discussion.

The last point I think will get a mixed response from what I've seen on
various sugar/olpc lists of late but the more I read about it the more I
believe its bugs that cause the majority of the problems rather than
hardware issues. For example all modern Mac's should boot SoaS fine (there
are a few issues [1]). Fedora on which SoaS is based doesn't have a lot of
the problems we see and they have a lot of different hardware and use cases
than the relatively focused SoaS so we should be able to fix most of the
issues

So I'd like to see some testing before the final release comes out for both
boot issues and others. For this I'm proposing we do something similar to
the Fedora Test Days. The way this will vary slightly is by doing "SoaS test
weeks" where we pick a number of test points to focus upon but do it both on
the mailing list and IRC to allow as many people as possible to get involved
and to ensure we have the best possibly release by doing as much testing
before the release rather than having discussions 6 weeks after the release
with threads like "Blah doesn't work".

So I'd like to hear from others what they'd like to see in SoaS 3, what they
can work on and suggestions for test weeks. You already know the topic of
the first week is going to be. I'd like to see SoaS moving to more
proactional releases where we do more testing before hand rather than people
running it up after its been releases so that we get a decent release from
the go get as. It makes the user experience better for the beginning for all
involved.

Discuss!

Have a good weekend!
Regards,
Peter

[1] Mac boot bugs
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=528232
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=533824
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