[Sugar-devel] Fructose - What is it? What should it be?

[Simon Schampijer]

Hi,

this came up several times now. People where wondering what Fructose is. 
 From the definition it is:

The Sugar developers will need some example set of activities with which 
to demonstrate Sugar. This set is Fructose. The packages in Fructose 
should be selected to make the resulting environment as impressive as 
possible for a potential client or user. Packages should therefore be 
stable, polished, and exercise the widest possible range of features. 
Fructose may also serve as an example for people constructing their own 
Activity sets. [1]

The current list of activities can be found at [2].

The fructose activities follow the Sucrose development cycle (0.84, 
0.86...). This means they follow the freezes, provide source tarballs, 
need a present maintainer etc. The duties are described at [3]. The 
activity gets noted in release notes, possibly more attention by the 
localization teams as revenue.

In the end their are downsides and upsides to be part of Fructose. There 
were some arguing, that only system dependent activities should be part 
of it (e.g. Browse with the dependency on hulahop).

There were some discussions that we would loose the show case activities 
when an activity would not be part of Fructose anymore. This comes down 
to packaging, as for rpm packaging one needs to provide the source 
tarballs and need to follow certain rules. Some distributors may ship 
the .xo bunles at one point, otherwise probably won't, so it is a good 
habit to do the source releases.

Anyhow, this is a bit of the background. Let's think how we can move 
forward on this topic. We should do it quickly, to be able to keep the 
work on 0.88 going.

Regards,
    Simon

[1] 
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Taxonomy#Fructose:_The_set_of_demonstration_activities
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Release/Modules
[3] 
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Release#New_modules_proposal