[Sugar-devel] OLPC mesh support in Sugar-0.84

[Bernie Innocenti]

El Wed, 19-05-2010 a las 21:40 -0400, Bernie Innocenti escribió:
> I'll probably change your mind this week-end when I'll show you how the
> 0.88 build is coming along :-)

Sorry to respond to myself. I realized that I may have sounded like an
overconfident, pretentious jerk. (thus betraying my actual nature :-)

While I could work quietly and let the facts speak by themselves in due
time, I think it's important to get everyone working together from the
beginning.

Soon or later, this work will have to do be done *anyway*. Only, it will
be much harder without the support of a deployment and David's team.
Other deployments are finally starting to contribute and we badly need a
build on which we can integrate their contributions. Let's not waste
this unique opportunity to revitalize Sugar's development.

Remember when we were organizing Sugar Labs, two years ago? Rather than
helping, many were looking with skepticism. I even heard someone bet
that we'd collapse within 6 months. I think we've managed to win that
gamble, but it was twice as hard than it would have been with the full
support of the entire community.

Backporting even more features from 0.88 to 0.84 would be doubly lame:
it would drain our resources for removing incentives for deployments to
stay close to their upstream, thus hindering our long-term goal of
sustainable development.

I'm seriously convinced that 0.88 is low-hanging fruit which will
benefit most of our users without causing too much trouble. Deployments
with a fetish for seasoned software can keep using 0.84--even 0.82--
basically forever. However, at least *some* children will benefit from
our work on 0.88. All the kids of Caacupé are going to get it, which is
sufficient motivation for me to go ahead full speed.

Accelerating development benefits deployments more than anyone else.
Sugar is still a 0.x product for which most new features can also be
seen as bugfixes. If your favorite desktop couldn't even print, wouldn't
you consider it a major flaw worth of switching to a different OS? It
seems we've not yet reached the point where we could sit back and relax
to admire our finished product.

Besides, we all know well that "deployments want XYZ" is a very relative
excuse. Some deployments want X, others want Y... most can be convinced
to agree on Z, especially when other more adventurous deployments take
the lead.

Paraguay is simply great: they lead technologically in Sugar-land
because they've always taken some chances. They were the first
deployment in the world to suffer for the 0.82->0.84 transition, now
they are the first benefiting from it.

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