[SoaS] Sugar on Fedora looking forward

[Peter Robinson]

>> 1) gstreamer 1.0 support in Activies. The 0.10 series is well and
>> truly dead and unmaintained, but there's a couple of key Activities
>> that still depend on it. Clock and Record are the two big ones here.
>> Are there any plans to move them to gst1?
>
> They were moved.  Check the release announcements and the tarball
> directories.
>
> http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/honey/Clock/Clock-20.tar.bz2

Ha, already have that, will review packaging and make sure it's all right.

> http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/honey/Record/Record-200.tar.bz2

Awesome! This makes me happy, thanks!

>> 2) GTK2 sugar-toolkit, again a number of Activities still haven't
>> moved to gtk3, any plans?
>
> Yes.  We have a contributor working on that now, so please make sure
> we know which ones Fedora think are still GTK+ 2.  Time critical.
>
>> 3) eToys, we've not shipped this by default for some time, I plan on
>> retiring it and any of it's dependencies in Fedora 29. Good riddance
>> sugar-presence-service!
>
> I've no news on this one.  Best to contact Etoys project.

They stopped responding years ago, they never even got around to
removing the presence-server dep. I've retired it now.

>> 4) This is the big one... python2. With python2 being EOL real soon
>> now is there any interest in moving to py3, I know there was some work
>> years ago to do some readiness here with the move to gtk3 but I don't
>> remember the details. Fedora is actively moving to python3 and has
>> been for some years, I think for at least 6 releases it's been
>> possible to run without py2 installed at all. Is this the nail in the
>> coffin for Sugar?
>
> Our port to Python 3 is going well.  We have good working code in pull
> requests and branches, and plan to merge it once we have the critical
> components complete.  Our plan is in the GitHub projects tab for the
> organisation.

Awesome news! Is there a rough timeline for this?

> Your downstream transition plan can be one of;
>
> - package sugar-toolkit-gtk3 as both Python 2 and Python 3, so that
>   Python 3 activities can be packaged, and so that Python 2 packages
>   you have now need not be rushed into Python 3,

We'll likely take this option and then drop the py2 once there's no
longer any dependencies.

> - package sugar-toolkit-gtk3 as only Python 3, and make sure all your
>   Python 2 activity packages are either dropped or ported to Python 3.
>
>> Also with my note above about time and the points in between are there
>> still people interested in Sugar on Fedora? Anyone interested enough
>> to assist?
>
> I agree, downstreams need help, it's a big job to keep this
> maintained.

Do let me know if you know of people that are interested, the more the
merrier and I'm happy to assist with Mentoring.

Peter