[sugar] Relationships w/ upstream.

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 4:56 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll be presumptuous and speak on behalf of "upstream."  Sugar
> developers are cognizant of the needs of OLPC and will go out of their
> way to make sure that the (by far) largest Sugar deployment is
> successful. Has this been questioned?

No, and it's good to hear regardless.

>> At the moment, I've been assured that upstream does *not* want to fork
>> sugar, and in fact will go out of its way, making special exceptions
>> for OLPC patches which conflict with sugar freezes.
>
> At present, there is no reason to fork Sugar that I am aware of and as
> with any project, there is a mechanism for requesting "special
> exceptions", for example CJB's request regarding OHM and the Sugar
> Control Panel.
>
> It is hard to tell from #7381 what the heated discussion on IRC may
> have been about. There is certainly not consensus regarding the merits
> of the "free-form" Home View, but it is being accepted upstream,
> AFAIK. We do plan some user studies of this View, the results of which
> may (or may not) be compelling evidence to reopen this decision.

Yes, things are going well right now, and the current issues are not
problematic.  I was just trying to preemptively communicate
expectations, so that any future minor fork of sugar is not seen as
adversarial, but instead a natural solution to allow decoupled
development -- in the same way we use small forks to handle such
issues in other components (such as telepathy, initscripts, etc).

I think we're all agreed that even small forks have large long-term
costs, and we'd prefer to avoid them where at all possible -- which we
all agree seems to be the case at present.
 --scott

-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )