[sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship

[John Gilmore]

> I'll say that the impression that I have received as an outsider is that 
> the people working on Sugar have not at all been interested in 
> compatibility with normal linux software.

It's more accurate to say that while they are somewhat interested in
that as an abstract idea, they are much more interested in making
their interface whizzier, which is fun, and in rewriting the most
obviously braindead parts of the Journal/Datastore, which staves off
programmer and end-user insanity.  (I'm paraphrasing drastically, from
having watched a bit of their goal-setting for the next release from
afar.)

If someone came along with clean patches to make Sugar work better
with normal Linux/Unix software, I think they'd accept them.  (Some
patches to Gnome, KDE, and other window managers are also going to be
needed, at least if Sugar apps want to show their current SVG icons;
no other window manager supports drawing SVG icons.)

If the community waited around til the two? three?-person Sugar team
got around to implementing these features itself, they might have to
wait til 2010 or so.

Somebody who implemented Sugar in the early days clearly didn't
understand the X11 networked graphics model -- or didn't mind breaking
it for expediency -- but they only broke it in small ways, which are
pretty easily patched up.  The problems in the Journal and Datastore
are much more fundamental, thus are getting more immediate attention.
E.g. I diagnosed bug http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5744 and 5719 in the
initial OLPC G1G1 software release.  It refused to play (or delete!)
audio or video files from external drives until they had been copied
into the local 1GB Flash memory -- even if that filled up the entire
file system and then rendered the system unbootable.  That has been
patched, but just barely; the API still comes with terrible
assumptions like "of course the application will make a copy of every
file it touches".  I do not know who designed that API, but I don't
think they should be permitted to graduate from junior high school.

	John