State of the update.1

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 10:22 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>  It is called an "update". Anyone who updates to a current update.1
>  build loses those activities. As far as I am aware there has been no
>  official announcement exactly how to get back the missing activities.

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/011509.html (a
thread you participated in)
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6598#comment:12

I apologize for not making a more prominent announcement; it's on my
list of things to do before we declare the next release candidate --
and we haven't gotten there yet.  I am way overextended; I'm doing my
best to keep all the cats heading in one direction.

>  Without an effort to get back the activities (which was not even
>  mentioned as a to-do item in your message) I indeed do not think it
>  is "reasonable".

It was mentioned as a release note item.  Again, I'm sorry that I
didn't spell it out completely: there will be a prominent message on
the home page pointing people to an activity pack which will install
all the G1G1 activities on top of the update.1 build.  You assistance
in creating that pack would, of course, be greatly appreciated!

>  This entire dropping of activities came out of nowhere. Until a few
>  days ago I thought that we were all together working on a new OS
>  version called update.1.

Again, I apologize that this was not better communicated, but I am
not, in fact, the release manager or the build manager, or anything.
I'm just a software engineer who's trying to make things work.  There
was a big summit at OLPC at the beginning of last week to try to get
critical bugs fixed for Peru.  I strongly recommended at that meeting
that we make an update.1 build for G1G1 users, and then move on to
update.1.1 to address the customization and networking concerns of
Peru, Mexico, Nepal, etc.  I was overruled; it was decided that we did
not have the resources for this (a point which I certainly concede).
So, the needs of update.1 are driven at this point primarily by the
needs of our deployment countries.  It may be that the result will be
unsuitable for G1G1 folks, although at the moment it's only the
activity pack business which fits uncomfortably.  But we don't have
the resources to tackle everything at once.

Again, this earlier discussion should have made it's way to devel@
last week.  I'm not certain that it was my personal responsibility to
do so, but I will apologize at any rate.

> Judging by other comments I am not alone in
>  thinking this. I am following the lists very closely, but until I saw
>  that ticket about removing activities there was not any hint that
>  this is not going to happen.

Again, we were under time pressure and the (incorrect) assumption was
that we could wait until we have a public release candidate to clarify
how the core builds worked.  It's always a big effort to write the
documentation at the same time as the implementation, but it obviously
would have helped a lot here.  I hope that in my voluminious emailing
this week I've done at least a little bit of retrospective
documentation.

> I as an activity developer of one of the
>  formerly "pre-installed" activities still do not know how to proceed.
>  You could at least communicate your intentions, if indeed providing a
>  useable build is not possible soon.

Again, the builds are designed to be usable for Peru, Mexico, and
Nepal.  I am hard at work (although constantly distracted by all this
email) at providing a full customization key image that allows us all
to test exactly the configuration they have requested.  Walter Bender
is the head of the deployment team.  If you want further insight as to
which activities are being installed in which countries, and the
recommendations he is making, you should contact him.  It's not a
technical issue any more, it's a deployment-side issue.  It may well
be that we need a new mailing list specifically for the community to
keep track of deployment issues; the weekly emails might not be giving
activity and content authors enough insight into the actual
deployments.
  --scott

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