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

[Walter Bender]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 7:38 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 11:51, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 16:03 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
>>> Agreed. You can do what you are doing (run a school on newish sw, get
>>> a tight feedback & bugfix loop) when someone like you is there.
>> [...]
>>> Yes -- but we gotta remember that it's productive (specially for
>>> Sugar) because you are there. You can turn their frustration into
>>> valuable info (and bugfixes). Without you, it's just frustration.
>>
>> Indeed :-(
>>
>> I'm trying to get everyone on IRC and mailing lists before I leave. In
>> Nepal it worked, but here the language barrier is higher.
>>
>> I told everyone that Spanish is welcome in bug reports, blog posts and
>> for chatting on #sugar. Many of our core developers speak Spanish
>> fluently, so they could bridge information to the others.
>>
>> Admittedly, it's not working: people come to IRC, they see that everyone
>> speaks English, and shy away. I don't believe in breaking the community
>> apart in many per-language ghettos, but Spanish probably has enough
>> critical mass to justify a #sugar-es (or #olpc-es) channel.
>
> I have invested efforts in the past in that direction, but they
> haven't taken off. We have sugar-desarrollo and we used to have a
> channel as well, but haven't seen much use.

#olpc-paraguay seems active because it has a tangible purpose. I
imagine the same is true for whatever channel developers use in .uy.
Maybe we should encourage more local foci for the initial engagement?
Invite promising new contributors to use the same channel as the
developers supporting their deployment. Naturally the interesting
discussing on #olpc-paraguay seem to spill over into #sugar (well, the
occasional deliberate push by Bernie or Raul helps).

We will eventually figure this out :)

-walter

> If we had a deployment team, we could try to make a push so that
> people from different deployments talk together in an open space...
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>>> That's a good idea -- try to work in a school with "latest" Sugar late
>>> in the previous school year, to incorporate stuff for the wider
>>> deployment in the over-summer-holidas upgrade.
>>>
>>> (And actually we have a late-starting deployment in La Rioja, which is
>>> on-time to take advantage of that work.)
>>
>> Cool! A lot of stuff is moving forward here:
>>
>> * This Monday we'll have another meeting with the "formadores" to help
>>   them file complete and understandable bug reports without the need
>>   for us to go on-site.
>>
>> * We're now tracking the remaining bugs here:
>>   http://wiki.paraguayeduca.org/index.php/Devel/Builds/Todo
>>
>> * Two more developers of the Paraguay Educa technical team are learning
>>   to create OS builds. Next week, they'll start helping out with
>>   activities.
>>
>> * The formadores (teacher trainers) got used to the differences
>>   in the new software release and are no longer diffident.
>>
>>
>>> That's truly a good question. I'll say "the teams closest to the
>>> deployments". "Distant" upstreams (kernel, udev, Fedora) don't care
>>> directly about our end users. OLPC/SLers are passionate about children
>>> learning.
>> [...]
>>> Yep - that and combine it with working with a few schools on recent
>>> releases, with a developer on-site -- like you, Simon and others are
>>> doing.
>>
>> Yes, we definitely need more errant developers! Since there's a limited
>> amount of core developers in OLPC and SL, in the future we may want to
>> encourage deployments to exchange developers. The Paraguayan team now
>> employs hackers with two years of experience. The same is probably true
>> in Uruguay.
>>
>> It would be great if one of them could travel to the fledgling
>> Argentinian deployment and help them build capacity locally. A
>> decentralized model of international collaboration would solve the
>> scalability problem.
>>
>>
>>> In practice, it probably means we'll be answering questions about any
>>> release for about 1.5 to 2 years after the release date.
>>
>> Interestingly, Mark Shuttleworth has recently argued for a 2 years cycle
>> synchronized across all the enterprise distributions:
>>
>>  http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/290
>>
>> If his proposal acquires enough momentum within the community, it would
>> make sense for us to synchronize with it, solving the issue of being
>> left behind by the rest of the development community.
>>
>>
>>> Noooo. I'm not so crazy. But we have to fit in the school's
>>> 1-year-cycle, have time to stabilise, etc. Small deployments have more
>>> flexibility, and when someone like you is literally on site you can go
>>> wild... (take advantage of that!) but for the thousands of other
>>> schools an LTS
>>
>> Testing and stabilize a new version of Fedora and Sugar on the XO could
>> be done with as little as a few thousand students in a small town, with
>> just 1-2 developers on site.
>>
>> After we're done with Sugar 0.84, I'll try to repeat the development
>> cycle for Sugar 0.88 and Fedora 12, starting with few adventurous
>> volunteers such as the Scratcheros.
>>
>> --
>>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>>
>>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org