[Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[David Farning]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 5:51 AM, Peter Robinson<pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> As a developer, dropping .xo support would take a lot of work from my
>>>> shoulders, but I suspect our users would kill us...
>>>
>>> I suspect users will kill you as well when activities don't work on
>>> machine X but they do on Y....... your damned if you do, damned if you
>>> don't. Either way there's going to be pain, whether its the in the
>>> short or the long term.
>>
>> Yeah, I guess Jonas' suggestion of promoting platform independent
>> bundles as "first class" addresses this concern.
>>
>> I personally don't think we are going to be able to outdo rpms nor
>> debs so the less binary code we have the better.
>>
>> That said, our users are free to do whatever they want and Sugar will
>> be deployed in wildly different scenarios. So I think that leaving
>> some extra flexibility is wise because if we try to anticipate all the
>> ways in which Sugar will be used, we'll fail.
>
> That's the advantage of open source - people can do what ever they
> like. I think from the sugar perspective there needs to be some
> standard defined and recommendation made +to make supporting it easier
> rather than just sitting on the fence.

This is one of the main values of the 'platform' as discussed in this
week's digest.  Pushing these decisions in to the sugar core creates
'conventions' for activity developers and deployers.  Conventions
reduce the effort required on the part of downstream developers.
CORRECTION   _Good_ conventions reduce the effort required on the part
of downstream developers.

david

> Deployments or people of course
> are then free to ignore those recommendations and package half a
> binary distribution up in their .xo if they so choose. At the moment
> its not so much of an issue but moving forward I think that if
> something isn't well defined now we're going to end up with a massive
> support burden going forward with users coming to mailing lists
> complaining because activities don't work and that sugar is bad
> because nothing works.
>
> Peter
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