[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] activites known not to either work at all or not on certin platforms

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:00:19AM +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>I see frustration but I'm having trouble knowing who should have done 
>something and failed to do it.
>
>Can we get a list of issues, each of them with a list of people that 
>may be able to do something about them?

I believe clarity about these kinds of issues are cluttered by 2 
factors:

a) Overloading or "running ahead of" upstream work

To exemplify a) let's look at Write: It depend on libabiword, which is 
not yet available in Debian.

Debian POV: libabiword should be packaged for Debian and then Write 
should be packaged as well.

Ubuntu POV: Hack together libabiword and Write packages until Debian 
provides them.

Sugar POV: Hack together Write package with libabiword embedded until 
included by distros

So multiple parts of the chain can "do something" about the issue. Some 
long term, some being hacks. Hacks has a high risk of causing confusion 
(and even worse if done badly).



b) Activities wrongly treated as independent of system and architecture.

Imagine the standard Write .xo package. It works on systems that provide 
libabiword but fails otherwise. There is no way to express as part of 
the .xo packaging that it requires this library, and no way for Sugar 
install process to check if the package will work.

Imagine a hacked Write package embedding libabiword. What architectures 
to compile the library for and include with the package? amd64? powerpc? 
powerpc64? How about Pentium optimizations for ia32 (so-called "i686")?

Imagine Chat. How can the end-user know that version 60 and newer won't 
work on 0.82? It cannot be expressed in the packaging, only on some web 
page that the user then needs to read ahead of updating.




  - Jonas

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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