Making updating easier

[Michael Stone]

> I've been thikning about update issues a bit and was wondering
> if we have plans/processes in place to handle maintaince of multiple 
> releases? 

My perception of our "basic purpose" is that we're in the business of
creating reference OSes which can be modified "with OLPC support" at
fixed points of extension (activities, keyboard settings, etc.; Peru) or
which can be used for inspiration to create more customized (but less
OLPC-supported) works (Uruguay, Nepal). In the latter case, our
expectation is that people who customize our examples will periodically
meet with us to exchange mergeable material. We also hope that they
will, from time to time, rebase their changes onto our newer reference
OSes.

If one accepts this statement of "basic purpose", then it follows for me
that our "basic responsibility" is to create, document, and train people
in infrastructure, packaging, build creation, issue/request-tracking,
and release processes which facilitate parallel work on each of the
streams of development that have active audiences.

Recent examples of our response to this proposed responsibility include 

 * the creation of the USB-based fixed-extension customization
   technology, 

 * Scott's "image-builder" for producing disk images from "customization
   keys"; i.e. for making local releases from reference OSes, 

 * our mutual formulation of -build, -devel, -testing, and -updates
   Koji tags for the construction and maintenance of the package-sets
   associated with releases.

 * the work that went in giving, recording, and publishing Scott's
   mini-conference our present series of tech talks 

 * time spent working with Emiliano Pastorino of Uruguay on
   incorporating knowledge and technology from Uruguay's customizations
   of the 640-656 series builds into our own.

However, as you rightly remind us, there is a fundamental question which
is not addressed by any of the work described above: what support, if
any, does OLPC offer for its reference OS releases? Is the support
bounded below by some stronger "basic responsibility"? Is it bounded
above by some limit on the temporal extent of the support?

I don't have any idea what the real answers to those questions might be.

Michael