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

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 07:10, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>> 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.
>
> 0install is just a specification and some tools.  It's not even a distro.
>  Of course there's no central build cluster.  If we want to target many
> different distributions, then we will have to provide our own build
> machines... many of them (possibly VMs).
>
>> 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?
>
> No distro packager in his right mind would offer packages for 90% of the
> activities on ASLO.  They're crap.  This is as it should be.
>
> If Sugar is working as intended, 99% of Activities will be crap.  This is
> because the purpose of Sugar is to invite novices to engage actively in
> software development.  Novices make bad stuff, and we want to install and
> run that stuff.  This means we can't rely on any transmission medium that
> requires human approval.
>
> James Simmons has written a book about how to write Sugar Activities.  I
> want novices to read his book and make new, bad Activities.  I want to
> install those Activities as soon as they're written... may even before
> they're totally written.  This is the nature of open collaborative
> development: you run other people's pre-alpha software.  I also want
> novice developers to be able to install each other's bad activities
> without having to learn how to produce distro bundles and then shove them
> into their system package manager.
>
> I don't want the developers to have to learn three different bundle
> formats, and then build six different bundles for different versions of
> different distributions.  I definitely don't want to make them submit
> their software to five different distro bureaucracies, and then fight
> through QA five times.  I don't want to wait six months before I can try
> their Activities.
>
>> 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.
>
> Native package systems are highly tuned for their purpose, not for ours.
> It's not even really the formats that are the problem.  It's the software
> that processes them, and the bureaucracies that control the repositories.

It may do us good to keep an eye of what Ubuntu is doing about what
they call "opportunistic developers" and Quickly:

http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/10/19/ubuntu-and-the-opportunistic-programmer/

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly

Regards,

Tomeu