On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 2:31 AM, Bernie Innocenti <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 :-)
Not exactly. > 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: Agreed. > * GSM connectivity requires up-to-date versions of udev and > modem-manager to support USB dongles commonly available in stores RH updates those sort of components regularly to ensure support. > * Playing multimedia content downloaded from the Internet requires > gstreamer with up-to-date codecs That is not due to up to date codecs but rather patent free codecs. Completely different issues. That is as valid with F-13 today as RHEL-5 > * activities such as Record tend to uncover obscure bugs in GStreamer Nothing stopping these being fixed in RHEL/CentOS. > * 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 RHEL updates this regularly as well and actively moves to the current version. I believe RHEL-5 has firefox 3.5 > * ...not to mention NetworkManager... Mention what about it? We don't use any of the latest NM features, its stable and the maintainer actively assists and accepts patches. > > 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. You are not alone, you should see my BZ queue. >> 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. In fact alot of the differences in packages were merged back in by me in the F-10/F-11 timeframe. I'm well aware of those issues, I still track them closely. I just wish it was the same with the kernel :-) > 2) we switch to a real package system for activities with full support > for dependency checking and a build cluster for multiple targets. One word. PackageKit. Then its agnostic for all the distributions. > 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. You've obviously not dealt with them then on the RHEL side of things. I work for a company that had over 1200 RHEL systems. There are advantages to both approaches and I don't see that supporting both is going to be an issue to do so at least in the short term. I don't see that we need to rule out either option. Peter _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
