[sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar

[Walter Bender]

Michael,

First, thank you for launching this discussion thread. It is important
to get our heads out of the trenches on occasion, even if everyone is
overwhelmed with the details of the day-to-day task of getting 8.2 out
the door.

I have to echo the point made by Martin: in fact, despite no living up
to some people's expectations, we have gotten a remarkable amount of
help from the community--it takes time. Of course we want to and can
do better and I think this discussion will help in that regard.

I won't rehash the various points raised so far in this thread except
to say that we need to keep in mind that Sugar is part of a larger
ecosystem--the OLPC Fedora distribution and School Server--and is
moving towards a broader set of deployment scenarios, including
Debian/Ubuntu, other hardware, other network infrastructures, etc.

It has not been easy to draw a clear line between Sugar (the UI) and
some of the other components, such as datastore/filesystem, Rainbow,
power management, the network and collaboration layers, etc. It is
clear from even a casual review of the devel and sugar lists and trac
that much of the frustration experienced by both users and developers
resides not in the details of, for example, dbus or Python, but rather
in more catastrophic and unpredictable failures of the network,
collaboration and the datastore. I have been and remain of the opinion
that unlike the UI and security aspects of Sugar, which have been
architected, if not fully realized,  the lack of a published and
vetted plan of record regarding all aspects of the
network/collaboration model -- and that only recently has there been a
coherent plan emerging regarding the datastore/filesystem -- that we
have been perceived as fumbling around and difficult to work with. I
hope that OLPC and Sugar Labs can find the wherewithal to create these
much-needed architectural documents, as I think they will help to
clarify the goals to which the community can mobilize its means.

I hope that the creation of Sugar Labs sends a message to the FOSS
community that the Sugar vision is alive and kicking. We have been
trying to institute a number of more developer-friendly habits,
including a rational release process, documentation efforts, open
discourse, etc.

I have every confidence that Sugar is having and will have a great
impact on learning. "Don't despair!"

-walter