[Sugar-devel] Supporting Sugar .88 on the XO1

[Paul Fox]

david wrote:
 > As Bernie announced, we working on supporting Sugar .88 on the XO-1.

hi david -- 

for those of us joining this thread late, can you expand on what/who
you mean by "we"?  (or tell me to read the archives, if that's
more appropriate.)

paul


 > This projects is customer driven by the deployment in Paraguay.  They,
 > along with bernie, made a decision that it would be more useful,
 > usable, and cost effective to settle on .88 rather than .82.  This
 > strictly a decision made by a single deployment, which I support.
 > 
 > As an ecosystem we can make lists of Pros on Cons why this is a good
 > or bad decision and why I am an idiot.  At the end of the day this was
 > a decision made by a deployment.  The primary reason for this decision
 > is that the deployment does not yet has an established base of .82
 > machines.  Something we need to be aware of as developers is that
 > deployments think on a much longer scale.  As developers, if we have a
 > bug we can commit a fix and rebuild within a few days.  Deployments
 > can take weeks if not months to push a minor update.
 > 
 > Major version upgrades are something developers can do every six
 > months.  From my experience a couple couple of weeks of 'hmmm,  better
 > file a bug on that' and I have well running machines after an upgrade.
 >  For a enterprise, such as a deployment, the decision to update
 > becomes much harder and takes much longer to implement. As Martin
 > pointed out, a significant amount of Quality Assurance goes into a
 > deployment upgrade.  Not only do the hardware, OS, and learning
 > platform need to work together, all infrastructure, activities and
 > third party applications must also work after the update.  The problem
 > just got significantly harder:)  If I hit a bug while while sitting in
 > my office that is one thing.  If a teacher hits a bug where the
 > computers no longer connect to the server that is another thing
 > entirely.
 > 
 > On the other hand, there have been several significant improvements in
 > both Sugar and Fedora over the last couple of releases.  It would be
 > valuable to make those improvement available to end users.
 > 
 > My research has indicated that education institutions find that 3
 > years is the right balance between stability and improved
 > functionality of new software.  Because to the newness of the Sugar 2
 > years is a reasonable first round of updates due to the higher than
 > normal increases in usefulness and usability.
 > 
 > Blame and credit are important motivators in this game:( As such, if
 > we fail, it is the fault of Bernie, paraguayeduca, and I for: 1)
 > starting with a bad premise, 2) making bad technical decision, or 3)
 > making bad operational decisions.  If we fail it will be due to the
 > cooperative efforts of deployments, Sugar Labs, OLPC, and other
 > interested third parties.
 > 
 > david
 > _______________________________________________
 > Sugar-devel mailing list
 > Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
 > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel

=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org