[Sugar-devel] Sugar versions in the field (was Re: How to setup a environment to develop activities)

[James Cameron]

On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 11:30:09AM -0500, Sebastian Silva wrote:
> In reality, one never knows what one will find in the field.  In
> large deployments, like Perú, upgrading software versions may take
> an entire year, and may never reach all students.
> 
> In Perú, the most likely Sugar you will find in the field is
> actually still an image based on 10.2 with Sugar 0.84, which is
> still the official image. Yes, that is Sugar *before pretty
> toolbars*, which first appeared in Sugar 0.86.
> 
> It has been a success of the local Sugar community to get the
> Ministry to pilot and hopefully deploy an image based in Sugar 0.94
> in 2014 which is argueably still the better performing / stable
> quality Sugar.
> 
> Probably the best thing to do is to develop for current Sugar 0.98+
> and if you want to reach a specific place, just be prepared to bring
> updated operating system images with you. This is a little tricky
> because of the DRM in XO laptops. Only signed images will install on
> "secured" laptops. Most of the time, to my knowledge, images signed
> by OLPC can be used, except in Uruguay where OLPC's signatures don't
> work and you are forced to used official government (Ceibal)
> operating system images.

What I see missing from the Sugar ecosystem is backport packaging, to
ugprade an OLPC 10.2 installation with, say, Sugar 0.86, or later.

There's a few technical challenges in this:

- there are features of Sugar that depend on new underlying packages
  in Fedora,

  (workaround #1: don't backport that feature in full, workaround #2:
  something like 0install for Sugar, in a similar fashion that Aleksey
  used for activities),

- some deployments have no root access for the user,

  (workaround: the backport to occupy the user directory),

- lack of version switching infrastructure in OLPC OS.

  (workaround: the backport to provide fallback to old version.
  multiple version capability is present in OLPC OS, but it has an OS
  scope, not a Sugar scope.)

Perhaps Sugar Labs could consider, for a future release, a way to make
upgrades of Sugar decoupled from Fedora packaging?

A non-technical challenge is that the long term user base for this
packaging is much smaller than the long term user base for a release.
But the short term user base can be huge.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/