On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 11:30:09AM -0500, Sebastian Silva wrote:
In reality, one never knows what one will find in the field. In
large deployments, like Perú, upgrading software versions may take
an entire year, and may never reach all students.
In Perú, the most likely Sugar you will find in the field is
actually still an image based on 10.2 with Sugar 0.84, which is
still the official image. Yes, that is Sugar *before pretty
toolbars*, which first appeared in Sugar 0.86.
It has been a success of the local Sugar community to get the
Ministry to pilot and hopefully deploy an image based in Sugar 0.94
in 2014 which is argueably still the better performing / stable
quality Sugar.
Probably the best thing to do is to develop for current Sugar 0.98+
and if you want to reach a specific place, just be prepared to bring
updated operating system images with you. This is a little tricky
because of the DRM in XO laptops. Only signed images will install on
secured laptops. Most of the time, to my knowledge, images signed
by OLPC can be used, except in Uruguay where OLPC's signatures don't
work and you are forced to used official government (Ceibal)
operating system images.
What I see missing from the Sugar ecosystem is backport packaging, to
ugprade an OLPC 10.2 installation with, say, Sugar 0.86, or later.
There's a few technical challenges in this:
- there are features of Sugar that depend on new underlying packages
in Fedora,
(workaround #1: don't backport that feature in full, workaround #2:
something like 0install for Sugar, in a similar fashion that Aleksey
used for activities),
- some deployments have no root access for the user,
(workaround: the backport to occupy the user directory),
- lack of version switching infrastructure in OLPC OS.
(workaround: the backport to provide fallback to old version.
multiple version capability is present in OLPC OS, but it has an OS
scope, not a Sugar scope.)
Perhaps Sugar Labs could consider, for a future release, a way to make
upgrades of Sugar decoupled from Fedora packaging?
A non-technical challenge is that the long term user base for this
packaging is much smaller than the long term user base for a release.
But the short term user base can be huge.
--
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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