[sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 2:46 AM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
> I disagree because I think that the approach we have taken has made it
> much harder for others to help us. For a project like Sugar, this
> ultimately results is less software of less quality in the same
> timeframe. At least, that's what I take away from the Trac and xmonad
> examples. (When you examine your own "notoriously easy-to-contribute-to
> projects", do your conclusions match mine?)

That's a tradeoff and a very difficult one. In retrospect I tend to
think we invested too little on enabling contributions. But you should
consider a few of things:

* Sugar is very much of an experimental project at the UI level. It's
making big progresses on that front but even now it's far from solid.
To be able to iterate on UI design you need quick prototyping. And to
be fair, in so many respects, Sugar is still a prototype and will be
for a long time.

* Deployments are putting a huge pressure on us. We can't just delay
features to do them right, often we are just forced to hack them up at
the best we can.

* The disproportion between the project expectations and the bootstrap
investment is simply ridiculous.

Marco