[sugar] Relationships w/ upstream.

[David Farning]

On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 16:37 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> Since a conversation on IRC got unexpectedly heated, let me restate my
> personal philosophy for OLPC's relationships with upstream:
> 
> (a) I believe that we should put OLPC's goals *first*, and endeavor to
> ensure that we are always meeting the actual needs of our clients,
> forking whenever upstream's goals/process/schedule interfere with
> OLPC's ability to actually ship software responsive to its needs and
> its client's needs.
> 
> (b) That said, I acknowledge that forks have a huge long-term cost,
> and that in order to effectively develop software with a small group
> of developers we can't afford to keep paying fork costs over and over
> again.  Thus, we also have a responsibility to work closely with
> upstream to prevent the necessity of a fork.

I don't think we need to worry very much about this issue.  Once we,
OLPC and SL, get our release schedules and process worked out.  These
issues will work themselves out.

Pretty soon, Sugar Labs will be pushing a new release out every six
months.  There was a thread a few weeks ago about OLPC releasing every
six months and SL basing our release on the lead time OLPC needs do
prepare a Sugar tarball for release.

To keep things in perspective, remember the horrendous release problems
Debian had a few years ago:)  They seem to have gotten them pretty well
resolved lately.

dfarning