[Sugar-devel] ANNOUNCE: Sugar 0.88 for the XO-1

[Bernie Innocenti]

El Mon, 31-05-2010 a las 08:19 +1200, Tim McNamara escribió:


> Just for my knowledge, does Fedora have an equivalent to Ubuntu's
> long-term support releases? 

Yes, it's called Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and it comes with commercial
support. If you want a free-beer equivalent with no guarantees, CentOS
is a bit-for-bit exact copy of RHEL, except for branding, update sources
and a few other things.
> 
> 
> Without thinking too deeply about the implications, it make sense (to
> me) to peg XO development to something that's stable over a few years.
> That way package versions etc will be widely known and consistent.

This can also be achieved by choosing an arbitrary release of Fedora and
sticking to it for 2 years, as we did.

One might argue that the Fedora release would no longer get any security
and stability updates after some time. Well, this is true but irrelevant
to us, because the the XO OS does not use the standard Fedora update
tools.

So far, all XO systems have remained frozen to whatever packages were in
the Fedora repository the day the build was made, without picking up any
of the updates issued subsequently. In practice, this is not as scary as
it may sound, because the attack surface of an XO is indeed very
limited: xulrunner (Browse) and telepathy-gabble (WAN collaboration).

It would be good to improve the situation, but as was discussed in the
past, yum does not seem to work very well on the XO. Manually tracking
the relevant upstream security updates would require some effort.

Until someone offers to do this work, all we can do is bury our heads
under the sand and pretend there's no problem :-)

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