> I'll say that the impression that I have received as an outsider is that > the people working on Sugar have not at all been interested in > compatibility with normal linux software.
It's more accurate to say that while they are somewhat interested in that as an abstract idea, they are much more interested in making their interface whizzier, which is fun, and in rewriting the most obviously braindead parts of the Journal/Datastore, which staves off programmer and end-user insanity. (I'm paraphrasing drastically, from having watched a bit of their goal-setting for the next release from afar.) If someone came along with clean patches to make Sugar work better with normal Linux/Unix software, I think they'd accept them. (Some patches to Gnome, KDE, and other window managers are also going to be needed, at least if Sugar apps want to show their current SVG icons; no other window manager supports drawing SVG icons.) If the community waited around til the two? three?-person Sugar team got around to implementing these features itself, they might have to wait til 2010 or so. Somebody who implemented Sugar in the early days clearly didn't understand the X11 networked graphics model -- or didn't mind breaking it for expediency -- but they only broke it in small ways, which are pretty easily patched up. The problems in the Journal and Datastore are much more fundamental, thus are getting more immediate attention. E.g. I diagnosed bug http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5744 and 5719 in the initial OLPC G1G1 software release. It refused to play (or delete!) audio or video files from external drives until they had been copied into the local 1GB Flash memory -- even if that filled up the entire file system and then rendered the system unbootable. That has been patched, but just barely; the API still comes with terrible assumptions like "of course the application will make a copy of every file it touches". I do not know who designed that API, but I don't think they should be permitted to graduate from junior high school. John _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
