Michael, First, thank you for launching this discussion thread. It is important to get our heads out of the trenches on occasion, even if everyone is overwhelmed with the details of the day-to-day task of getting 8.2 out the door.
I have to echo the point made by Martin: in fact, despite no living up to some people's expectations, we have gotten a remarkable amount of help from the community--it takes time. Of course we want to and can do better and I think this discussion will help in that regard. I won't rehash the various points raised so far in this thread except to say that we need to keep in mind that Sugar is part of a larger ecosystem--the OLPC Fedora distribution and School Server--and is moving towards a broader set of deployment scenarios, including Debian/Ubuntu, other hardware, other network infrastructures, etc. It has not been easy to draw a clear line between Sugar (the UI) and some of the other components, such as datastore/filesystem, Rainbow, power management, the network and collaboration layers, etc. It is clear from even a casual review of the devel and sugar lists and trac that much of the frustration experienced by both users and developers resides not in the details of, for example, dbus or Python, but rather in more catastrophic and unpredictable failures of the network, collaboration and the datastore. I have been and remain of the opinion that unlike the UI and security aspects of Sugar, which have been architected, if not fully realized, the lack of a published and vetted plan of record regarding all aspects of the network/collaboration model -- and that only recently has there been a coherent plan emerging regarding the datastore/filesystem -- that we have been perceived as fumbling around and difficult to work with. I hope that OLPC and Sugar Labs can find the wherewithal to create these much-needed architectural documents, as I think they will help to clarify the goals to which the community can mobilize its means. I hope that the creation of Sugar Labs sends a message to the FOSS community that the Sugar vision is alive and kicking. We have been trying to institute a number of more developer-friendly habits, including a rational release process, documentation efforts, open discourse, etc. I have every confidence that Sugar is having and will have a great impact on learning. "Don't despair!" -walter _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
