[sugar] etoys - binary blob in GIT

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Joshua,

> I suggest starting a new GIT repository without the image. Those who are 
> interested in history can create a graft to the old repository.

  Then, from now on, we are going to manage the "history" of the image
in not-so-well-managed manner (i.e., just a bunch of hand-numbered
files in a directory).  Which is more or less ok, I think.

  What the Etoys team actually uses for our own change management is
called "update stream" mechanism.  That is a sequence of small patches
in text.  These patches are kept on an FTP/HTTP or WebDAV/HTTP server,
and the developers submit the patches via FTP or WebDAV, and other
users and developers fetches them via WebDAV or HTTP into their EToys
image.  The image in the git repository is made in this way.  95% of
the case, it is enough to recreate a "practically" identical image by
merely fetching the patches.

  These small files are the result of "real development work" and
should probably be kept as the record.

  We are not keen on changing the "fetch" part of it, as it is so nice
to be able to download directly into the OLPC image.  That means
that it would be nice to have a directory on a server that looks like:

http://squeakalpha.org/swupdates/external/updates/

and available via HTTP.  To push a patch, one could imagine to use git
and then some server side process copy the file to the directory.  It
won't be desiable to be able to modify the files on laptop.org via
less secure channel than ssh.  The downside is that not all Etoys
developers have enough machinery required for using git.

  Alternatively, the developers uses an update stream somewhere else,
and occationally one of us copy the patches to laptop.org to keep them
recorded.  Even so, making available these patches in a directory
would be nice.

-- Yoshiki