2588 - Journal unusable

[Chris Ball]

Hi James,

Thanks for these thoughts.  They seem like worthwhile goals, but I don't
think we're likely to get there in practise.  In specific:

   > It is as if joyride is being used as part of developers' edit,
   > compile and test sequence.  Wouldn't it be more appropriate to do
   > this sequence privately before a developer releases their changes
   > to the public?

So, first of all, this "developers -> public" distinction is bogus;
these aren't "public" builds, they're developer builds, and the only
reason this seems odd is that most companies aren't doing their
development in public.  We _do not have_ a private build stream to use
to stage builds in before letting you see them, and we don't want one.

   > Here's how it would happen ... the developer would build a new RPM,
   > install it on a test unit, test that it works, *before* publishing
   > the RPM for the joyride to pick up.  If any failures occur due to
   > integration against other developer changes, then stronger
   > dependencies should be added.

Many of the people supplying RPMs that we end up using in Joyride are
not writing them for the XO -- they might be Fedora updates, or even
upstream Sugar changes that are tested under jhbuild and not the XO.
We're going to have to deal with this as part of accepting that we
(OLPC-the-company) don't write >90% of the code we ship, and don't
have influence over the people who do write it, most of whom we'll
never meet.

Finally, I think it's a little unfair (but not in an offended kind of
way) to expect us to have stable or even working Joyride builds at the
moment: we just moved to Fedora 10, and it's always going to be the case
that a bunch of stuff breaks and you have to go through the breakage
piece by piece; this isn't a case where we'd have a working build if
only some developer had tested her changes before throwing them over
the wall into Joyride.

   > I'm also waiting for the joyride builds to be usable before I
   > consume download data resources on them.

All that said, the desire to *have* a working build is a very reasonable
thing, and that's why we're trying hard not to trick anyone into
thinking that Joyride contains that build.  If you have the time and
bandwidth to help shake out the bugs, we'd love your help; if you don't,
that's fine too and you should stay on 8.2.x for another few weeks.

Hope that helps!

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>