[Sugar-devel] Assorted Debian+Sugar bugs

[Michael Stone]

> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 07:52:11PM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
>> Jonas & co:
>> 
>> I just wanted to report a couple of regressions that I found today
>> while trying out sugar-0.84 on Sid. In no particular order:
>
>Thanks for reporting this.

You're very welcome; thanks again for your hard work packaging sugar!

> Even better, however, is if you file issues like this as proper
> bugreports.

I haven't diagnosed the causes of these issues so I don't actually know what
packages are at fault yet; I'm just reporting behavioral regressions.
Consequently, I don't know what packages to file the bugs against. :)

> I will respond here, cross-posted to both list, to respect your choice
> of communication platform.  But there is a higher risk that your
> information will not get tracked and the issues not solved by doing it
> this way.

By all means, feel free to enter the information into the tracker of your
choice. I will be happy to follow your lead. I simply do not wish to file
reports with faulty information.

>>  4. Lastly, it seems surprising to me that installing
>>     education-desktop-sugar and sugar-0.84 results in fewer activities
>>     installed on Sid than it does on Squeeze. In my testing today, Pippy was
>>     the only activity visible in the List View.
> 
> Yes, I currently package all parts of Sugar currently officially
> packaged for Debian, and yes, I am involved in the Skolelinux project
> too.  But no, I am *not* involved in that education-desktop-sugar
> package and it is poorly maintained as far as I am aware.  I recommend
> that you remove that package to not confuse yourself and others about
> what is Sugar in Debian.

Thanks for this clarification; I shall improve my test cases. Thanks also
working to narrow dependencies -- this is always appreciated. You may, however,
be interested to know that, as of yesterday, sugar-0.86 depends on
substantially more material than sugar-0.84. (To the tune of 300 MB more, I
think.)

>> P.S. - Please also find attached the output of "dpkg -l" run from inside my
>> testing chroot. This chroot was constructed by the code in the "sugar"
>> branch of
>> 
>>  http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/mstone/puritan
>> 
>> with conf/distro == debian and conf/debian/distro == sid.
>
> Ahem, does this mean that you did not in fact use a Debian system but
> some homecooked lookalike?

I test sugar in chroots so as to be able to efficiently generate reproducible
results across multiple distros. My debian chroots are constructed with
debootstrap, as is apparent in the "debian.mk" Makefile in source code that I
mentioned. 

I find that this leads to an excellent and rewarding testing workflow because
it is very low-frustration, because it permits me to test both stable and
unstable versions of the code, because it permits me to control for differences
in packaging, and because it permits me to work up system changes across
package boundaries by editing in vivo before worrying about how to present
those changes to the rest of the world.

Regards,

Michael