Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds
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? ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds
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/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds
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 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel