[Sugar-devel] Duplication of Effort: Don't do it.

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 27.07.2009, at 15:24, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

> Agreed, but the important point here is taking out barriers, even if
> they are psychological ones. By aligning yourself in the GNOME or KDE
> camp you are getting out the radar of a big part of the free software
> community.

Well said. Sugar can only benefit from making it easier for people to  
contribute activities written in their favorite system.

> If OLPC or any country using Sugar where paying some upstream
> developers, maybe we wouldn't depend so critical on the software
> produced by volunteers, but right now nobody seems to be willing to
> spend resources in software development so we need to get good at
> getting coders on board.

Right, and you can't force volunteers to work on what you like best  
anyway. SugarLabs can only encourage contributors to use the default  
Python+GTK stack, and this will be the easiest and best-supported, so  
it is a natural choice. But it's not the only choice, and shouldn't be.

Sugar has been designed to support activities written in a wide  
variety of ways. Its just not equally simple.

This reminds me of discussions in the early Sugar days when Alan Kay  
begged the Python community to start working on a truly expressive  
authoring tool for children. I know of only one developer who even  
tried, but couldn't keep up the effort. Instead, we then worked on  
integrating Etoys (written in Squeak) with Sugar. Returning from  
Squeakfest Brasil now where teachers from Uruguay and Peru OLPC  
deployments showed the amazing things their students did with Etoys, I  
must say it was the right thing to do. Even if that means the Sugar  
platform is not as uniform as we'd like it to be.

It takes deep knowledge of Sugar internals to write an activity if you  
are not using the default toolkit. It's great that Tomeu helps the  
folks who would like to use Qt for their activities. We need more of  
this.

- Bert -