On Mon, 2010-04-12 at 23:54 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote: > Bernie, I'm not sure the point of this point at this point in time. To > copy and paste part of the response I did to the other thread on > fedora-olpc for others benefit. > > I personally don't see the point discussing it because from where I > sit I believe it will be supported well in both and continue to be so. > That way people have the choice. It might well get to a stage where > the newer versions of sugar won't run in RHEL/CentOS due to whatever > deps at which point we get to a situation where that release becomes > like 0.84 is currently and is a long term support release. I don't see > why its hard to support both because its not. The package maintenance > is simple and is done easily by a couple of people. There will be > Fedora and it will continue to be supported in Fedora for the > developers and the like that want the bleeding edge and then there > will be the EL branch for those that don't like so much blood. Its > called choice. There's no reason to limit it. There's not much point > discussing it at the moment as RHEL-6 isn't out yet, yes its in beta > but its not out.
I agree on this, but it misses the point :-) I'm sure maintaining the Sugar 0.84 packages will be easy in RHEL6 as it is in F11. I've even back-ported Sugar 0.88 to Fedora 11 with minimal tweaks. Most end-user support issues lay within base OS components rather than the relatively small codebase of Sugar. Here are some real-world examples from this development cycle: * GSM connectivity requires up-to-date versions of udev and modem-manager to support USB dongles commonly available in stores * Playing multimedia content downloaded from the Internet requires gstreamer with up-to-date codecs * activities such as Record tend to uncover obscure bugs in GStreamer * Browse depends on xulrunner for security and compatiblity with web standards. Surfing the web today with a version of Firefox from 3 years ago would be unthinkable * ...not to mention NetworkManager... I would guesstimate that 80% of my time went into fixing platform bugs and just 20% on Sugar itself. In part, this is because I could offload the actual bugfixing to helpful people such as alsroot, silbe, sayamindu, mtd and others. > In short RHEL-6 isn't out yet, the associated CentOS6 release is quite > a while away as a result. Also ARM isn't a supported platform there. > Sugar is about options and I think having both options will be of > benefit to different users. I believe the leading edge Fedora will > continue to be a platform for development and then others in the know > or deployments themselves can make the decision as to what's best for > them. In practice, choosing the distro independently of Sugar won't be feasible on the XO until: 1) we merge (or kill) all the OLPC customizations. dsd and sdz have done a lot of work in this direction, but there are still a number of rogue packages in F11-XO1. 2) we switch to a real package system for activities with full support for dependency checking and a build cluster for multiple targets. After this is done, it remains to be seen if someone who is using RHEL-6 on the XO would be able to file a bug in Red Hat's Bugzilla and actually get it fixed for free. I have a feeling one would need to purchase an enterprise support contract of some kind in order to attract the necessary developer attention. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel