[Systems] Local Sugar Labs

[David Farning]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:17 AM, Ivan Krstić
<krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
> On Dec 2, 2008, at 7:53 AM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>> The Wikipedia seems to be doing that.  Let's ask some Mediawiki
>> experts on IRC.
>
> Wikipedia subdomains (country wikis) are _actually_ separate wikis.
> They just use a single codebase on Wikimedia servers, and detect which
> individual wiki to load based on the subdomain in the HTTP request. In
> other words, this isn't really what we want, although it's a
> possibility to set things up that way if we're OK with the increased
> complexity. I think it comes down to how badly the local Labs want
> translated MediaWiki sidebars.
>
Hey all
I am going to try to reply to all question in one consolidated post.

Interestingly everyone in the thread hit on the key issue;
fragmentation vs. autonomy.  As a general rule we want to allow, but
not require, Local Labs to be as autonomous as possible.

To a large extent, how to do an Sugar deployment is still an unsolved
question.  Thus we want to introduce as much parallelization as
possible into the solution.  On the other hand we want to reduce
necessary redundancy as much as possible.

One issue to look at is purpose of a Local Lab.  At this point in our
life cycle, the primary purpose is to provide the necessary
infrastructure to encourage the formation of region support
organizations.  The Local Labs will most likely not generate much
content that is of value to people outside their Local Lab.

Several of the teams that I have spoken with would prefer their own
wiki over a name space, mostly for reasons of ownership and identify.
The consequence of not offering them their own country.sugarlabs.org
name will be increased fragmentation as teams begin to create their
own web presence.

The best open source example of this is git and kernel development.
The distributed nature of git actively encourages forking.  If someone
becomes angry or wants to take the kernel a different direction, that
is fine. The balancing act is how to increase the value to
stakeholders to keep their code in the main tree.

1.  How about option of allowing the group forming the local lab to
chose between country.sugarlabs.org or a name space on
wiki.sugarlabs.org?  I don't believe that we need to worry about
setting up a translating infrastructure for Local Labs.  Their content
will be pretty language and region specific.

2. Mailing list. looks like a solved problem.

3.  As autonomous as possible.

david