[Sugar-devel] 0.84 maintenance

[Walter Bender]

Kudos Daniel.

Re the lack of maintenance of 0.84, as Simon pointed out, are ranks
are thin. But also, I am curious as to where 0.84 is being used in the
field. Are any of the major (or even minor) deployments using it? I
ask because I still wonder whether or not it wouldn't be easier to
backport 0.86 to F11 than revisit 0.84. Just asking, not suggesting
you stray from your plan.

-walter

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org