[SoaS] Sugar Creation Kit review for inclusion in SoaS

[Peter Robinson]

Hi Thomas,

My initial reaction is "Wow, what a lot of good stuff"! There's a lot
of stuff in here that is a feature in and of itself but (and there's
always a but) I feel the SCK as it stands won't become a 'Feature' of
SoaS. I'll make some bullet points below of my concerns and flesh the
data below.

* It includes 5 copies of SoaS and related derivatives.
* It includes 140 Activities
* It includes a lot of manual work
* Its MASSIVE! I've seen sizes ranging from 3.2 to 9Gb! We could fit
like 18 versions of the existing SoaSv3 into that!
* included documentation

So the fleshing out bit:
* 5 copies?
- If we need to ship 5 copies of SoaS we're doing something wrong.
- We don't ship old copies of SoaS in the latest version. Do you see
MS or Apple or Fedora doing that? No! Strawberry is no longer
supported, Blueberry is almost to that state. We don't have the
resources to deal with that and its a support nightmare. It also says
that we don't believe the latest version is the best.
- Size. People want one copy, to do that they don't want to download 5+

* 140 Activities
- No QA. The reason we cut down the Activities is Mirabelle was the
ability to provide well tested working Activities. The issue with Read
proves we had trouble dealing with 10. Doing that with 140+ isn't
sustainable.
- There's no guarantee of the license. We only want to ship free ones.
No flash. No Codecs etc.
- Binary inclusions. Support issues on the current SoaS release. It
causes problems and its hard to QA. See point above.
- Its out of date the moment you ship it

* Manual work.
- We need to automate as much as possible. Manual stuff has 3 main
issues. 1) error prone especially human 2) time consuming 3) QA.
- We want to automate more. Fedora has a feature called AutoQA. We
want to make use of stuff like this.

* Its massive!
- While the idea is great it generally doesn't work
- DVDs are horrible and likely to break. This is even worse in the
developing world where the "Sneaker Net" still applies because the
conditions are worse. 9Gb keys are still expensive when your in the
developing world where wages are low.
- It is out of date the moment you create it.
- Its large amounts of bandwidth, see 5 copies above.

* Included documentation
- It is out of date the moment you create it.
- Its static and not dynamic.
- Its generally wrong and out of date

So that sums up most of my concerns. The main concern is this though
"Its not one feature its a good dozen of them"

Some of the issues that SCK was made to fix we plan to fix in v4, they
were know issues and done like that for a reason. In the rest of SCK
there's a lot of good stuff that should be individual features in and
of themselves.

I hope that outlines some of my concerns and why as it stands I don't
believe the SCK can become a "Feature" of SoaS due to it being a super
set there of.

Peter