[Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar (was: slobs... blah blah)

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 9:53 PM, Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 4:04 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm not sure something like sugar which is (and should be) fast moving
>> mixes well with something like CentOS or its parent. At the beginning
>> of the v6 release cycle begins it will be fine but within 12 months
>> I'm sure everyone will want the features that are provided by the
>
> I read "everyone" here as programmers and early adopters.  It has been
> suggested that other people (regular teachers for example) might care
> more about the stability of the total user experience rather then new
> features.
>
>> latest release of gtk/glib/gstreamer/python/telepathy etc that just
>> won't be available in v6 so we en up in a situation we've been in
>> before where we either need to fork massive amounts of packages to get
>> the features everyone wants or moving back to Fedora. Both which will
>> require lots of work. I know what its like as I've spent lots and lots
>> of hours getting the changes merged upstream.
>
> I don't doubt that it was a royal pain.   But I believe the situation
> we are discussing now is a little different.  This isn't a situation
> where the functionality that is required to provide core use cases
> isn't available anywhere.  From the outside, it seems like most of
> this has been pushed upstream and will be maintained by others.  Now
> we are talking about what new functionality that comes in from the
> outside should be made part of the core requirements to run current
> releases of Sugar.  Should Sugar releases really require the latest
> version of everything (as defined by the latest Fedora) in order to
> function correctly?

Well it wasn't a royal pain if you didn't have to co-ordinate between
about 8 different parties. And most of the the "latest releases" were
in fact defined by the Sugar Development and had nothing to do with
Fedora at all so I suggest you do some research to find out the facts
before you actually define "royal pain". Things like Telepathy Tubes
were pushed forward to allow things like abiword (Write activity)
collaboration. There are still things that are being merged into
mainline that have been used by Sugar for a while and in the case of
abiword its only the soon to be released abiword 2.8 that will finally
merge those changes....

Peter