An OLPC Development Model

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 7:51 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
> Note that the meat of this proposal was *not* aimed at @laptop.org
>  employees, who I assume are savvy enough to get appropriate changes
>  upstream.  The real point here was to outline a devel strategy that
>  would work for 'out of core' changes made by external developers.  So
>  worrying about the "complexity and maintenance costs" is kinda beside
>  the point: these builds aren't being created or maintained by OLPC.
>  They are just a mechanism to create and test worthwhile changes to the
>  official build, and the merge window is a mechanism to get those
>  changes back into the official builds.

I think the main obstacle for external developers to get stuff into
the builds is the poor state of our release process. That's what we
should aim to fix.

IMO saying to external developers to come up with their builds
(without even providing a good way to build packages for those) and
that *we* will do the work to get them upstream is sending the wrong
message and I'm afraid it will just increase the confusion, as
happened with joyride.

That said I don't want to stop energy. People will play with your
ideas and we will see how it turns out.

Marco