<div class="gmail_quote">Hi Martin,</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Martin Dengler <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:martin@martindengler.com">martin@martindengler.com</a>></span> wrote:<br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im">On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 04:02:50PM -0400, Wade Brainerd wrote:<br> > Anyway, why are we talking about the effort to maintain a distro?<br> <br> </div>Because we keep getting requests to look like a distro vendor:<br> <br> - <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-July/016566.html" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-July/016566.html</a><br> <br> - <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO" target="_blank">http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO</a> (5 of 6 TODO items<br> are distro-vendor stuff)<br> <br> - <a href="http://sugaronastick.com/faq/" target="_blank">http://sugaronastick.com/faq/</a> (I'm not affiliated with this site)<br> <br> - endless discussions about disk layouts, e.g.<br> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-August/001937.html" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-August/001937.html</a><br> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-August/007650.html" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-August/007650.html</a><br> <br> - endless discussions about where to file bugs<br> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-August/007839.html" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-August/007839.html</a><br> <br> I could go on.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Would switching to a Fedora Sugar spin distribution answer any of these questions? SoaS just takes Fedora and makes it a bit simpler, and gives us the control to actually fix stuff for deployments.</div> <div><br></div><div>If we turned all that work over to Fedora, we would just lose what little ability we have to support deployments now.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> <div class="im">> SoaS obviously benefits from all of Fedora's work - just look how<br> > quickly it's moved from f10 to f11 to f12. It's just a tweaked .ks<br> > file and a brand name.<br> <br> </div>Have you tried building it lately? It's not rocket science but it's<br> not something I'd want to talk my parents through.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Sure, I made some tweaks to the scripts to improve the way virtual machine images were being generated. Like you said it's not the easiest thing in the world, but certainly something that a school's IT staff should be able to handle.</div> <div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im"> > >> And, we are marketing it with success (cf. worldwide tech press<br> > > >> coverage, the BBC, etc).<br> > > ><br> > > > How many people are using it? Satisfied with SoaS as a distro?<br> > > > What's the target deployment size, and what SL support will be<br> > > > required?<br> > ><br> ><br> > I see emails from the GPA deployment going by all the time. Are there any<br> > deployments using Sugar on a standard distro? Are there often mainstream<br> > media articles announcing "package foo available in latest fedora"?<br> <br> </div>I hoped you would apply your example to my questions:<br> <div class="im"><br> How many people are using it?<br> </div> GPA - 30-ish (I have no idea, really)<br> <br> Satisfied<br> No<br> <br> Target deployment size<br> 30?<br> <br> SL support required<br> Tons of emails to IAEP and sugar-devel, Walter, new partition layout<br> proposals, new hardware support requests...<br> <br> How does that one-micro-deployment resource load foreshadow the load<br> when SoaS becomes what you want SoaS to become? How can that be<br> achieved with the current SoaS/SL team?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Do we want children to use Sugar? If so, we need to do what it takes to make that possible. All those emails and nasty issues need to be answered. </div> <div><br></div><div>Right now, we are the only people who can do so are on these lists, and SoaS is the place they get fixed.</div><div><br></div><div>If in the future, Fedora solves all these issues for us, our kickstart file will get a lot simpler.</div> <div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im"> > To me, SoaS has always been the answer to the question "how do I run Sugar<br> > now that OLPC isn't providing OS builds?". It works well, it's actively<br> > developed, it brings in good press, so why are people questioning<br> > its value?<br> <br> </div>I don't see how you think I'm questioning SoaS's value. As a<br> contributor alone that would be an odd position. I'm questioning the<br> manpower and focus SL wants to bring to bear on it. I'd like a<br> statement I can point to when people ask for stuff that's out of<br> scope, because the email/bug <-> commit ratio is far greater than one<br> now :).<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Lacking a better solution, I don't think we have a choice but to dedicate the resources we have to it and try to grow the support infrastructure. The more schools use it, the more developers we'll attract.</div> <div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> I'm trying to point out that SL had better have an idea of what it<br> wants out of SoaS if it wants to invest time in it. So far it seems<br> like SL wants to put in (great) marketing and get out a linux distro<br> that beats Fedora in hardware and community support. </blockquote><div><br></div><div>I don't understand this point, which seems to be the crux of the issue... SoaS *is* Fedora. Are there any circumstances where Fedora would work better than SoaS on target hardware?</div> <div><br></div><div>-Wade</div><div><br></div></div>