[Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Sweets Distribution

[Walter Bender]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 8:31 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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"

I wasn't suggesting that Ubuntu was in any way at fault. We (SL) never
developed a robust Debian (Jonas being the exception) or Ubuntu
upstream community.

>
> 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.

Exactly. We need more people as stupid as you :)

-walter
>
> Peter



-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org