[Sugar-devel] Distributors mixing across Sugar branches (Was: Terminal v25 (attention distro managers!!))

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 10:12:07AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 22:55, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
>> Wade Brainerd wrote:
>>> Yeah, v24 introduced tabs.  v25 is a bugfix of v24.
>>
>> Hmmm, it has been packaged for Fedora 11 already. And F11 should only 
>> contain Sucrose 0.84. Please make clear what Sucrose version it is 
>> for when you announce new releases - since otherwise packagers pick 
>> it up and put it in 0.84?
>
>Wonder if that's a problem for SugarLabs? If a packager wants to 
>include an activity that is not part of the stable release of Sugar 
>that they are shipping, isn't that their choice?

I'd say so too.

What I see that Sugarlabs can do to help encourage distributors to not 
"fuck up" is to more clearly document what breaks by mixing.

I have been guilty of mixing: Debian 0.82-based packages contain a "too 
new" Browse. That activity will not run on an XO, but Debian contains a 
newer underlying library so it works proberly anyway (I believe).  But I 
couldn't find anywhere a list of what I would break by mixing - I 
learned about this particular shortcoming by following this upstream 
development list closely, until someone mentioned it. (I think I even 
posted an explicit question about it at somepoint, which I think was 
ignored).

I am not complining here, not at all: If we distributors mess your 
carefully composed dependencies, then we are to blame for breaking 
anything.  But your carefull composition is based on some assumptions of 
the underlying OS which are not universally true, and so does not apply 
to all versions of all distributions.


- From a distributor point of view, it would be nice to be able to look at 
the Homepage of each part of Sugar (sugar-toolkit, sugar-base, sugar, 
hulahop, Browse, etc) and see not only a download link for the latest 
and greatest release of that piece, but a download link for the latest 
and greatest release for *each* of your development tracks (i.e. 
currently 0.82, 0.84 and "bleeding edge") and also a brief note on which 
changes are not backwards-compatible.



Kind regards,

  - Jonas

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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