[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason

[Gary C Martin]

On 13 Mar 2010, at 18:12, Bernie Innocenti wrote:

> On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 12:07 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
>>> If you ask me: our recent F11-XO1 builds have reached equal or better
>>> quality than build 801, provided you disable automatic power management.
>> 
>> Are all activities working, including collaboration? In Gnome, can you
>> actually use FF? Camera?
> 
> 
>> 
>>> Hopefully, they will complain a little less on the next upgrade to 0.86
>>> and 0.88... Until they finally get used to the idea that software tends
>>> to improve over time rather than getting worse.
>> 
>> Or we slow down to a rhythm that they can cope with ;-)!
> 
> Slowing down deployment of new versions might make things even worse!
> 
> The more changes accumulate, the less familiar the new version will look
> like, and the more time the users got to get used to the experience
> provided by the old version, no matter how buggy it was.
> 
> The Vista vs XP effect.
> 
> The only way to reduce user adversity to change is getting them used to
> smooth change by providing a short development cycle with few changes
> that deliver clear improvements to the user experience in terms of new
> features or fewer bugs.

Agreed, though this argument only really works if the changes each time are easy to install from the user perspective with no loss of data. I wish we were doing much better here. It feels uncomfortable that Sugar 0.84 is already a year old effort as of this week, from its official release, too far ahead of deployments?

--G

> The #1 bait we used to push this new release onto teachers was 3G
> support. Suffice saying, GSM connectivity is very popular in places with
> no wired broadband.
> 
> Unfortunately, this wasn't quite true, bacause many popular Huawei
> modems use by default a "Windows compatible" mode in which they show up
> as mass-storage devices. After backporting udev to F-11, I found out
> that now users are being sold an even newer model of Huawei modem which
> is not yet supported by the Fedora 12 version of udev's rules.
> 
> Teachers blamed the new Sugar for breaking their shiny new modems: they
> seem unable to distinguish between a regression, a bug in new feature,
> or an entirely missing feature. Heh...
> 
> Anyway, now I found a temporary workaround and reported the missing
> feature upstream:
> 
>  http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=573250
> 
> Too bad it was so easy: support for new devices would have maed a major
> selling point for the next version of Fedora :-)
> 
> -- 
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
> \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
> 
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