[Sugar-devel] Release management for SoaS

[Bill Bogstad]

As I get more involved in making SoaS boot in various weird ways in
weird hardware environments, I've found the wiki pages and the various
download
directories to be a little disorganized.   I think that part of this
is because SoaS is fundamentally a different product from Sugar itself
in a way that isn't being acknowledged.  As I see it; Sugar, like most
free software projects, delivers source code and related materials
(documentation, etc.).   Those deliverables will be used by pretty
technical people to produce binaries.   Git and/or carefully generated
source code tar balls works for this kind of user.  SoaS is a (fedora
based) Linux distribution whose GUI is Sugar.   SoaS deliverables are
binaries (in various forms) as well as installation instructions.
People will download and run SoaS directly.   Hopefully, many of those
people won't be technical at all.   I don't think SoaS has good
release management on its deliverables yet.

I'm not sure how to get across my general concerns, so I think I will
point out two specific issues:

1. The various SoaS wiki pages make no real attempt to differentiate
between Strawberry instructions/file references and generic SoaS
descriptions/features.  A new SoaS release is coming soon and it's not
obvious how the instructions/files for this release will be kept
separate from Strawberry in the wiki.

2. The 'release' download directory isn't structured to keep
released/beta versions separate.  There also seems to be multiple
versions of the livecd-iso-to-disk.sh file
floating around.  I'm pretty sure that the version which can be found
there now is different from the one I originally downloaded with the
Strawberry ISO which is different from the one which is embedded in
the Strawberry ISO image.  The head of the Strawberry branch of this
file in git is not what is currently being distributed next to the
Strawberry ISO.

The bad news is that I can't think of any way to use git to keep track
of this for us.  It will probably have to be done semi-manually.  The
good news is that, except for daily builds,  there won't be that many
different versions that need to be managed.

Oh, and can we add a new naming scheme?   The next release of SoaS
should also be called SoaS 0.86, not just bratwurst or melon or
whatever.   It should be obvious from the name which version of Sugar
is included.  We can have still have cute names as well as boring
numbers.   We'll just have both (like Ubuntu does).

Thanks for your attention,
Bill Bogstad