[Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Oversight Board request: Not fully bundled .xo

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 17:01 -0500, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
> Aleksey Lim wrote:
> > * the major issue here that ASLO is not particalr deployment oriented
> >   portal, e.g. in OLPC case, mentioned issue is mostly means nothing
> >   since OLPC can effectively add/remove any component they think is
> >   useful for their users
> 
> I don't understand this claim.  ASLO is seeing literally millions of
> downloads from OLPC deployments.  Probably 99% of ASLO traffic is from
> OLPC's users.

If we want Sugar's user-base to keep growing in the future, we need to
keep our platform open and viable to users of different hardware.
Hopefully soon, also OLPC is going to switch to a non-x86 architecture.

It was clear from the beginning that fossilizing on a single immutable
ABI (32bit x86 + Fedora 9 + Sugar 0.82) was going to be a dead-end.


> As for the rest... I think .xo bundles should be absolutely free of binary
> executables, or anything else that depends on more than the Sugar
> Platform.  We should then introduce a different (better!) bundle format
> that supports such dependencies, based on 0bundle, 0install, etc.  As a
> temporary codename, call it ".x0".

While I've always been advocating for using a package system in Sugar,
I've not been doing any work in this direction. I'm enormously grateful
to Aleksey for being a "doer" with his pioneering work on 0install.

My only concern is that 0install seems to be itself another prototype
packaging format, with plenty of crucial features still missing. For
example, Aleksey was telling me last week that people build binaries on
their personal desktops because there's not yet a real build cluster
like Koji or Suse buildservice.

Meanwhile, distros are repackaging our xo bundles into native rpms and
debs... Are we sure we couldn't just sit and let the distros do their
job? I'm convinced that the unprivileged installation issue is easy to
overcome once we agree that native packages don't stink and are not more
complicated than they need to be.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/