[Sugar-devel] 0.84 maintenance

[Simon Schampijer]

On 12/01/2009 06:41 PM, Daniel Drake wrote:
> 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

Great, thanks for stepping up to do that work! And your approach to try 
to work on master first and then push to 0.84 sounds great to me, too.

Of course it is sad that 0.84 seems already old and unmaintained by now. 
We just have a problem with resources. If more people are taking action 
like, we should be in better shape soon.

Thanks,
    Simon