An OLPC Development Model

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 4:13 AM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
>  Scott - I don't need to bring the specter of drug abuse and mental
>  incompetency into an argument in order to tell someone that I strongly
>  disagree with them and that their position and demeanor are increasing
>  my frustration.

You're right.  Bert, I understand your position, but let me assure you
there is no hidden anti-etoys faction at OLPC!  I apologize for being
so short with you.

>  Dennis - in search of a quick defense, you've attempted to give certain
>  critics exactly what they asked for - a Joyride with no activities - in
>  order to let them crack their teeth on the barren fruits of their own
>  uncompromising positions.

No, I think Dennis did the right thing.  Once people install
activities in /home/olpc for 703, the activities in joyride are not
used anyway.  Let's be consistent here.  The only reason we didn't
before was that I was lazy.

I look forward to people writing a simple "install activities" script
for joyride, or if they get ambitious they can have a go at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_updater#Application_updater .

A little script would certainly be appropriate to include in joyride.
It would have been included in 703, but time constraints did not
permit it.

>  could each of you please decide to search for less combative ways to
>  express your frustration at revisiting old conflicts? (If I can be of

Well, if Bert would prefix his remarks with, "I know that Scott says
that there's no anti-etoys agenda, but..." then at least I'd know he
was listening to me. =)  I'd be willing to add, "I know that Bert
thinks there's an anti-etoys agenda, but..." to my responses, if that
makes him feel better. ;-)

I feel this discussion has been very fruitful!  The joyride and olpc3
branches have been sync'ed up with 703 and
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6966 and
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2064.  Further, much attention has been
focused on our need for an activity updater, so hopefully we'll get
some help writing that.
 --scott

ps. SJ, there are no 'core activities' that we ship.  There is only
one security-privileged activity (Journal), which we currently ship in
the core build because (a) Sugar breaks otherwise, and (b) Rainbow's
activity-signing stuff is incomplete.  I hope we can fix both of these
in time, and stabilize the APIs enough that we can eventually unbundle
even Journal.  Your notion of 'core activity' is probably worthwhile
for support and documentation reasons, but it bears no relation to the
build process.

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