New update.1 build 696

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Mar 5, 2008, at 16:08 , C. Scott Ananian wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 5:05 AM, Bert Freudenberg  
> <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>>  No, the etoys RPM is different from the Etoys activity. It is in the
>>  base build and cannot be removed, because Squeak is one of the
>>  supported languages of the XO platform (see http://laptop.org/en/
>>  laptop/software/specs.shtml). So Squeak-based activities like Etoys,
>>  DrGeo, BotsInc, etc. can still be installed.
>
> Yes, at the moment we are still installing necessary RPMs for all of
> the supported activities.  At some point, not soon, we might gradually
> try to remove these one by one to make activities more self-contained,
> and remove the artificial distinction between OLPC-supported
> activities and activities created by the community.  We won't be able
> to do that until we've got a robust activity updater which supports
> sharing common files between activities, etc.  (See trac #4951).

I'm not entirely sure what you are suggesting here.

The XO software is a platform, supporting a few select programming  
environments, as detailed in the spec I linked above. These do not  
have to be provided by the activities. The activities *are* self- 
contained if they only depend on these runtime environments, just  
like they depend on the X11 library, D-Bus, the Linux kernel etc.  
without having to include those.

>>  Nevertheless I would hope that Etoys (as well as TurtleArt and
>>  TamTam) would come pre-installed on a "learning machine".
>
> I believe Walter is so urging countries.  That's a policy question for
> Walter, not a technical question about the builds.

Well, as Ben commented on the ticket, there is no technical reason to  
have Chat, Write, Record, Paint etc. in the base build, either.

- Bert -