[Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 94

[David Farning]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 5:41 AM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> 2009/9/17 Jim Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com>:
>> So the real answer to your question is, how will the other kids
>> upgrade and when will they be able to do it?
>
> In the majority of cases (i.e. large deployments) it will be done as a
> coordinated effort by the overseeing deployment team. The deployment
> team will make the decisions of when to upgrade, which release to
> upgrade to, and how it will be rolled out.
>
> After getting past any applicable barriers imposed by OLPC's security
> system (not used in all deployments), deployments are free to choose
> to install any software they like. But I predict that they will stay
> with sugar even if other options become available.
>
> I don't know much about the direction or purpose of soasXO but I did
> notice it seems to have jumped to F12, so maybe it is taking on the
> role of being experimental/cutting edge.
>
> At least one realistic deployment option is slowly emerging -- OLPC is
> developing a F11-based OS (with Sugar as default desktop) for the
> XO-1.5, and is porting all the important deployment technologies like
> theft deterrence, customization key, olpc-update, etc. Community
> members are working to backport this to XO-1, which is a relatively
> easy thing to do. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/F11_for_XO-1
>
> There are still holes and bugs, most of which are also seen on the
> XO-1.5 so will hopefully be fixed in the near future. I should
> hopefully be back working on that side of things later this year.
>
> However for the XO-1 there is still uncertainty, even though we have
> code - who's going to do QA? Who's going to champion a release based
> on the builds we have already? or maybe none of that will happen in
> any capacity but at some point it will mature to the stage where a
> subset of deployments feel happy to start shipping it anyway.
>
> The XO-1 stuff depends heavily on the community so you should
> definitely be reporting any issues that you find, and if possible,
> doing anything you can to help fix them. We don't yet have a place on
> the OLPC trac for this but I'll work on getting that created...
>

One step in that direction might be to clearly communicate and try to
gather momentum around a series of stable releases.

One thought that might work is to set .84, .88, .94, and 1.0 as stable
releases for down streams to unite around.

.84 -> .88 = 12 months
.88 -> .94 = 18 months
.94 -> 1.0  = 24 months and in sync with debian long term support releases.

david