[Sugar-devel] Future of Rainbow + Sugar?

[Michael Stone]

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 02:08:38PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
>The changes to sugar might be minimal but the changes to the
>underlying OS are not so simple.
>
>From my (which is very basic) understanding there is patches to at
>least the kernel, initscripts, upstart and telepathy and possibly dbus
>to support rainbow. 

Peter,

You're confusing rainbow (the activity isolation component of Bitfrost) with
many other components including olpc-update, olpcrd, OFW, and hardware support.

Please read 

   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Rainbow

and let me know if you're still concerned about what's required to use Rainbow
or about how I intend to make it easier still adopt.

>This makes it very hard to use it in a standard distro environment especially
>where Fedora (for example) already uses SELinux to implement some of the
>features of rainbow.

I can see from reading the selinux-policy sources that lots of hard work has
gone into confining all sorts of system services. Tell me, though -- what
SELinux policy prevents a typical Abiword or Evince process, run by me from my
desktop, from writing to my ~/.bashrc?

Moreover, even supposing this policy exists, is it used by default on any
Fedora spins, let alone on the main Fedora livecds? Rainbow has offered this
safeguard, on by default on XOs, for over a year.

(NB: Perhaps, we would be better served by spending our time wondering how the
two technologies can complement one another, each sustaining guarantees that
are too expensive [in complexity] for the other to maintain?)

Regards,

Michael