[Sugar-devel] Future of Rainbow + Sugar?

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 18:29, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
> To me, Bitfrost was just one more lofty windmill OLPC tried to tilt because
> it seemed like an interesting challenge.  I'm not clear why Sugar needs more
> protection from rogue activities than a normal desktop environment has from
> rogue applications.
> Reinventing the desktop as a constructivist learning environment is a big
> enough task for one development team / community to swallow.  Reinventing
> security is an altogether separate cause.
> That said, Rainbow exists, so we don't need to do anything to remove it.  So
> long as people step up to maintain it and help activity developers fix the
> issues they run into.

Yeah, that's a very important point. I think we already know the kind
of issues we can expect to find and maybe should think twice before
throwing out all that knowledge.

I don't see Rainbow in Sugar as too controversial, because:

- the modifications needed to the Sugar platform are minimal,

- most activities don't need to be modified and the ones that do,
shouldn't be hard to modify (though there's the issue of unmodified X
apps),

- we have already agreed that we need a system-wide switch for
disabling Rainbow and a way to white list activities that for some
reason cannot run yet inside Rainbow.

That system-wide switch means that distributors of Sugar will be the
ones to decide if they want Rainbow or not. The Sugar community just
listens to their deployers and tries to find a way to accommodate that
need. No one is forced to use Rainbow, though it's true that activity
authors need to take into account a set of limitations if they want
their activities to run everywhere.

Regards,

Tomeu

> But Michael, what you seem to be asking for - someone to pick up your solo
> project and finish it - almost never happens in software development.  Code
> is a personal expression of the programmer who wrote it.  If it ever does
> get finished by someone else, it likely gets rewritten in the process.
> Best regards,
> Wade