[Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] sugar-jhbuild: no more Ubuntu support

[Sascha Silbe]

I am sad to announce that we are dropping Ubuntu support for
sugar-jhbuild. Karmic Koala (9.10), the last version of Ubuntu that
shipped all packages required to use Sugar (including all Fructose
activities), has went end-of-life on 2011-05-01.

Apart from a bug in the Ubuntu version of Xephyr that prevents
sugar-emulator from working out of the box [1], all recent Ubuntu
versions lack python-xpcom [2], a crucial package for Browse. The latter
issue can only be worked around by building all browser engine packages
(xulrunner, python-xpcom, hulahop) in sugar-jhbuild. We (that is, I)
lack the time to go this route again. At least in the past, Mozilla had
a bad record for security updates: most of the time, the required
patches needed to be hand-picked by downstream (in this case us) from
their VCS repository. This is not only error-prone, but also rather
time-consuming. AFAICT this hasn't changed a bit.

I can only hope that Surf grows to be a full replacement for Browse.
Once that happens and all required packages for Surf (probably going to
include some bleeding edge ones) enter the most recent Ubuntu version,
we can start supporting Ubuntu again.

I will keep the Ubuntu configuration files in the sugar-jhbuild
repository. Use them at your own risk. Feel free to send patches, but
please don't file bug reports about anything Ubuntu-specific.

Sascha

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/325706
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/480407/+index
-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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