[Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[Gary C Martin]

On 28 Aug 2009, at 11:57, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:51, 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. 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.
>
> I agree, what's the Activity Team's opinion on this?


My vote would go to agreeing on N (where N is a very small number)  
architectures we want to support, and then having a 'fat' Activity  
bundle solution so that Activity Authors desperate/keen enough to use  
something binary, that is not provided by the Sugar Platform, are  
recommended to include a binary for each N architectures in their .xo  
bundle.

Unsupported architectures are unsupported, until which time the  
community agrees to support a new architecture (i.e Nokia or Sharp  
offer to support us to make Sugar run well on there new glossy 10 inch  
multi touch wireless & 3G tablet aimed at educational markets, you  
know, the new wave that will hit in 6+ months once they start trying  
to play catch with Apple).

No compiling, no yum'ing, no apt'ing.

A simple hello_architecture activity and some Activity Team wiki notes  
would act as a template for authors. Perhaps we could fix up Paint/ 
Colours/Physics as other working examples.

Regards,
--Gary

P.S. Think this is pretty close to some work already done by Aleksey.