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

[David Farning]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Paul Fox <pgf at laptop.org> wrote:
> 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.)

Sorry, By we, I mean Activity Central and compnay that Bernie,
Caroline, and I have started to support OLPC and Sugar deployments.

It is going to take me awhile to figure out how to communicate with
the community.  I would like to keep the larger Sugar and OLPC
projects aware of what our company is doing.  But, I don't what it to
sound like a press release of pitch for the company:)

david
> 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
>  > _______________________________________________
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>
> =---------------------
>  paul fox, pgf at laptop.org
>