[Sugar-devel] feedback from the Distro (autopackaging team) at Sugar Camp and recent meeting with key members taking on that task

[David Van Assche]

We had an IRC meeting yesterday (1 day after sugar camp!) to decide
how to move forward with the decisions taken at Sugar Camp in the area
of making packaging easier, performance better, testing easier, and
volunteer support and QA attraction a more realistic process and
approach. You can see the wiki entry discussed (ie. what was said at
Sugar Camp) here:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Community/Distributions/OpenSUSE

Though it mentions openSUSE it is really distro agnostic, its just
that key members of the openSUSE team were at the IRC meeting to
discuss the synching of jhconvert with oBS (openSUSE build service) so
that we can totally automate the process from getting revisions of
glucose, fructose, and some honey directly to all distros and
platforms. That novelly (no pun intended) includes the ARM
architecture for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and openSUSE. You can check
the irc logs of what was discussed here if you have any interest:

http://en.opensuse.org/Sugar/Meetings

Other performance and testing automation includes better hardware for
buildbot and the revival of the sugarbot project (an auto testing bot
to some degree) though it was agreed at Sugar Camp that much more
manual performance and security testing must be done, since its
unrealistic to rely on automated tests only. Still, both Buildbot and
Sugarbot are intesesting concepts and should help the process of the
developers, triagers, and even QA people significantly.

What we're doing goes a little bit against the policies of many
distros, but remember we almost consider Sugar its own OS ;-) and
distribution maintainers of Sugar are free to take the dsitributed
source and build it all again if they really like. We are just making
sure that Sugar IS available everywhere for everyone, and that it is
not the distros deciding whether Sugar should be allowed in one
version or another. We just want the best Sugar out there available to
all. So distro maintainers of Sugar can either keep up with Sugar, or
probably have their users ousing Sugar repos elsewhere........

I hope this doesn't start any rifts or flame wars, that was not my
intention. As stated above, its just to get the best Sugar out there
as quickly as possible to everyone in all formats....

kind Regards,
David (Nubae) Van Assche