Maintaining Activity Packs

[Michael Stone]

Dear devel,

While drafting release notes for Update.1 RC2 (signed update.1-699), we
realized that we need a good story about what we want the ecosystem of
activity and library packs (for use with the customization key [1]) to
be.

The rough sense emerging from the folks I've interviewed so far
(dgilmore, kimquirk, walter, cjb) is that:

  * activity packs are collections maintained by public maintainers

  * people running deployments are responsible for choosing activities
    that work for them and we should assist in this process

  * for the moment, any activity packs that we provide are just
    conveniences and advice to them on how to get started

  * however, we should do our best to keep authoritative versions of all
    activities we encounter and to encourage other folks to mirror this
    content

  * to the extent that we are able, we should record the compatibility
    matrix between builds and activities

However, there are several questions that these rough thoughts do not
yet address:

  * what assistance are we obligated to provide to deployments?

  * if we discover notable flaws (security, legal, "objectionable
    content") in bundles that a deployment is using, what should we do? 

  * in particular, whose responsibility is it to initiate communication
    of this sort?

  * (and others not listed here)

Thoughts?

Michael

[1]: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Customization_key