Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

2015-05-08 Thread Samuel Greenfeld
There are at least two types of deployments/customers that Sugar has.

The first is the small, volunteer group.  To them, it doesn't matter what
OS they actually are using, or (to some extent) how well tested things
are.  They just want to come in, try something with their students, and if
they need to tweak something or something breaks, it's no big deal.

The second is the large deployment.  And large deployments, like large
corporations, do not want to deploy Sugar widely unless they have a chance
to thoroughly check it out.


First, they might investigate a bit to see who currently uses Sugar, and if
there are any other users they can get recommendations from.  Then they
might look into Sugar Labs, asking about Sugar's history, what warranties
were available, the future roadmap for features, etc.  They may insist on
having a face-to-face meeting with a Sugar representative, where they could
ask detailed questions.

You might laugh but when the OLPC Association was actively answering bids
for laptops, this dance happened all the time.

When large corporations sell things to each other, support can be
everything.  It doesn't mean that they are going to use it.  But if they
need a patch for critical bug on the President's laptop, or the latest
Shellshock or Heartbleed that their bosses' boss' saw in the news, they
want to have something or someone they can point to definitely get support.

Very few deployments have invested in the resources to internally make
their own OS images at that level of detail.


I don't want to go into it too much in this email, but dealing with large
organizations can be a very different thing.



On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:37 AM, Tony Anderson tony_ander...@usa.net wrote:

 I don't know what is puzzling. I can understand a deployment wanting
 assurance of long-term support for Sugar. I doubt there are many
 deployments that even know what Fedora or Ubuntu means. Even fewer that
 understand the difference between SugarLabs and Red Hat or Canonical as
 sources of this support.

 The word deployment may be a puzzle, In some cases it as a national
 ministry or OLPC Australia. For most of us, it is a school or other
 institution which has acquired OLPC laptops and is attempting to make use
 of them.

 There are many deployments which have never updated their image. In
 general, an update to an XO requires someone to come to the school
 with the technical expertise to do so. I am sure there are schools which
 have never seen such a visitor since they received their laptops.
 The positive element is that the laptops work as they always have. The
 downside, of course, is that the users have no chance to benefit from
 the new capabilities available from current releases.

 Finally, what urgent security fixes are required by a deployment with no
 access to the internet?

 Tony


 On 05/08/2015 12:55 AM, sugar-devel-requ...@lists.sugarlabs.org wrote:

 When I talked with deployments and they ask for Ubuntu,
 and I ask why, what they really want is Long Time Support.
 No deployment change their image more than once a year.
 In fact, change a image is a logistic challenge for most of
 the big/middle size deployments.?

 This continues to puzzle me.  LTS is a stream of security updates, and
 you say the deployments do not apply them until the next year?

 And yet they want them?

 They want something they don't use?


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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

2015-05-08 Thread Peter Robinson
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 12:04 AM, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote:
 On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:28:06AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
 On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:21 AM, Samuel Greenfeld sam...@greenfeld.org 
 wrote:
  The obvious counterargument would be that a deployment might want
  to deploy your XO-Next (whatever it is) alongside existing XO
  laptops, allowing all of them to have the same configuration.

 From my memory of olpc-os-builder it was very modular and wouldn't be
 hard to add dozens of different devices support to it.

 Yes, it would be straightforward to add commodity hardware support to
 olpc-os-builder.  Add kernel and boot loader.  Add some sort of
 installer.

 But we have SoaS, and SoaS works fine on commodity hardware, so why
 bother with olpc-os-builder?

Because same process for any and every device. A single process is a
good thing, it makes it easier to understand and get a consistent
configuration everywhere.

 Because olpc-update?  Nobody uses it.

The interesting thing here is that Atomic on Fedora would provide
everything that olpc-update was designed to do and it could make
upgrades between Fedora releases much easier and less of an issue with
regards to TLS. Plus probably a bunch of things that it currently
doesn't and it's upstream being actively developed, instead of home
brew, would likely ease the security updates issues mentioned
previously and easy pushing out of updates, caching updates for
bandwidth etc.

 Because preinstalled activities?  SoaS can do that too.

  There's plenty of blame to go around in terms of re-inventing the wheel and
  lack of communication.

 Yep!

  There simply (and correct me if I'm wrong) are not the resources inside of
  OLPC, outside, or combined at this time to maintain and update two separate
  builds  build systems.
 
  It amazes me how far we bend over backwards to avoid saying end of life
  and end of support.
 
 
  I have seen a fair amount of interest, both publicly and privately, for
  newer XO laptop builds.  But I don't think the requesters realize how much
  work it takes to make one.

 The big one here is kernel kernel kernel.

 Yes.

  And I do not forsee anyone stepping up to get the XO-1.75 and XO-4 kernel 
  drivers into a state they can be upstreamed or upgraded for newer Fedoras
  unless a deployment really wants this instead of newer equipment.

 Or even the 1.5, I believe most of the XO-1 support is upsteream.

  Newer operating systems tend to require more disk space and RAM than the
  predecessors.  We have seen this even within Fedora's lineage.

 Yes, and no. I mean 1Gb of the original XO-1 is tight, but SoaS still
 happily fits in 4Gb with a bunch of space to spare. Looking at my
 current SoaS VM the used space is around 1.9Gb. Amusingly the various
 cloud/container enterprise initiatives actively help us here because
 for once they care about dependency bloat too :-)

 The two things that add bloat to the current SoaS image are:
 * Browse needs to be converted to the new WebKitGtk APIs so we don't
 ship two copies of WebKitGtk.
 * Conversion of remaining gstreamer 0.10 to 1.0 to allow us not to ship that.

 Ultimately I think you could with a little development effort get it
 down to 1.5Gb used space which would make a 2Gb filesystem quite
 usable.

  Since OLPC already appears to be going the Ubuntu LTS route, I would argue
  it would be easiest to take everything that way, porting utilities as
  required, and make that the final image  build system for XOs.

 Personally I have no interest in that. I wish you luck.

 --
 James Cameron
 http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

2015-05-08 Thread Gonzalo Odiard
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 7:49 PM, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote:

 On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 11:28:42AM -0300, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
  When I talked with deployments and they ask for Ubuntu,
  and I ask why, what they really want is Long Time Support.
  No deployment change their image more than once a year.
  In fact, change a image is a logistic challenge for most of
  the big/middle size deployments.

 This continues to puzzle me.  LTS is a stream of security updates, and
 you say the deployments do not apply them until the next year?

 And yet they want them?

 They want something they don't use?

 If a vulnerability is reported just after they make their image, the
 children are exposed to the vulnerability for the rest of the year.

 It seems more likely that the meaning of LTS is not understood.

 Fedora continues with security updates for a similar time period, but
 if the deployment uses our builder unchanged they won't get them.  I'm
 expecting that if a deployment needs LTS on Fedora they will assume
 the responsibility to apply the updates when they make a build.


All valid points. I sent a email to the deployment to ask for more
information.
I will report when have a reply.

-- 
Gonzalo Odiard

SugarLabs - Software for children learning
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