[Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Sweets Distribution

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 12:47 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 1:37 AM, Ma Xiaojun <damage3025 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have same question. I know packaging maybe hard. But user would
>> expect Sugar for all Ubuntu versions have official support.
>
> Yes. Packaging is hard. And as far as I know, we've gotten little if
> any feedback from the Ubuntu community about their Sugar use, so
> little encouragement for the people doing the packaging. And as Sascha
> pointed out in a previous message in this thread, some packaging
> decisions made by Ubuntu in the past have made things more difficult
> for us. All of that said, of course we want to have a great Sugar
> experience on Ubunutu. So how do we go from hit and miss to making
> this a sustained effort?

I'll concur with it being hard. I've been dealing with sugar packaging
and associated dependencies for around a 4 year period which has
covered 8 Fedora release cycles (I started with getting OLPC changes
upstreamed into Fedora 9).

I disagree with Ubuntu making packaging decisions making it harder,
they were probably fairly unaware of our requirements until after
they'd broken it. You need someone to engage constantly in the
upstream community to ensure our requirements are at first known, and
then understood and ultimately implemented. It's a constant and
ongoing process that is generally pretty thankless and time consuming.
You have the upstream community replying with what amounts to "WTF" on
some requests but by building a relationship with upstream you get an
understanding and even begin to change the way people think. I now
have people come to me  regularly and ask "what impact would this
change within Fedora have for Sugar and OLPC"

So ultimately to take it from hit and miss to something constant and
sustained is you need someone to step up to the plate and commit to
being that community liaison on an ongoing long term basis. Not sure
you'd find a second person as stupid as me to do that voluntarily
though.

Peter