[Sugar-devel] 0.84 maintenance

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

Earlier this year, OLPC began developing a new laptop (XO-1.5) and OLPC
OS (based on Fedora 11). Sugar-0.84 was hot off the presses at that time
so even though it may feel a little dated today, it's what we've been
working with and will soon be shipping in large quantity.

One issue that we've been facing is various regressions since Sugar
0.82, some of which have been fixed in Sugar versions later than 0.84
and some which are still pending. As nobody seems to look after 0.84 any
more we've been backporting these fixes into a local branch for our OS
builds.

Now we're going to move to making these changes in the usual sugarlabs
git repositories (sucrose-0.84 branches) and publishing them as regular
Sugar releases of the main components. This is an improvement/cleanup to
our current development processes and will open it up for other people
to become involved. (we already have our 'offline fork' including about
15 patches, but we're not being very organised with our development
working this way)

So, OLPC will take over maintenance. To start with we'll just be working
with sugar and sugar-toolkit.

Me and Sayamindu will be taking care of this. There may be exceptions,
but in general we'll only be taking patches that are already in master.
We'll focus on fixes, but if there are really important features
then we'll take them too (ad-hoc networking support is the 1 example we
have right now).

Of course, we'd love support from those of you who are actively involved
in Sugar development. In a way it's a bit sad for us to see that 0.84
maintenance already seems to have been halted, but at the same time it's
certainly our responsibility to make contributions as well.

So we'll try and keep the community updated on the issues that we are
facing, and hopefully you will be interested in helping us out. We'll be
shipping this to a lot of children. Thanks for the continued
developments on sugar, but don't forget that
developing is only a small part of the challenge...!

Also on this topic - we will certainly run into issues where activities
themselves progress beyond the Sugar-0.84 platform; if activity authors
could work to minimize these cases (i.e. keep backwards compatibility,
remain responsive to bugs) it would help us avoid a huge headache, and
will help your activities spread to various corners of the globe.

Thanks,
Daniel