[Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model

[david at lang.hm]

On Fri, 9 May 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> On 09.05.2008, at 09:59, david at lang.hm wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 7 May 2008, Jim Gettys wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 09:17 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 6 May 2008, david at lang.hm wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> ubuntu takes packages maintaned externally and picks what version
>>>>> of each of
>>>>> those packages to put in the main distro. the versions of these
>>>>> seperate
>>>>> packages are almost entirely independant of each other. they then
>>>>> do a lot of
>>>>> testing and some development of adminitrative tools and ship the
>>>>> result.
>>>>>
>>>>> unfortunantly much of the OLPC development has seemed to be
>>>>> against the idea
>>>>> of having external software run unmodified on sugar, and the
>>>>> resulting work
>>>>> to get anything running will hurt this model.
>>>
>>> David,
>>>
>>> We must fix this....  Help greatfully appreciated.  It isn't very
>>> much
>>> work to get there from here.
>>
>> at the moment it doesn't seem as if there's agreement yet that this
>> does
>> need to get fixed. until the problem is acknowledged it can't be
>> fixed.
>>
>> unfortunantly my time constraints drasticly limit the code I can
>> work on,
>> so I am mostly a tester and a provider of resources to nearby
>> developers
>> (I just received my two g1g1 machines back from the USC hackathon)
>
>
> There is agreement that unmodified Linux software should run as well
> as possible in Sugar.

this is good. I have not received this impression from reading the list.

what about Sugar software running as well as possible on normal linux 
boxes? without having to install the full sugar package and run 
everything under sugar in one window. this doesn't mean that some 
libraries won't need to be installed, but like running QT apps on a Gnome 
desktop, you install the QT libraries, not all of KDE (and similarly 
running gtk apps on a KDE destop you don't install all of gnome)

> There is no agreement that this would imply we do not need Sugar, or
> that activities written/adapted specifically for Sugar would not
> provide an order of magnitude better learning experience. That's the
> whole point of starting this endeavor in the first place.

I wouldn't expect for this to imply that sugar is not needed or that the 
software stack you have been working on isn't the best possible for a 
learning envrionment.

but if people are actually willing to seperate the activities from the 
platform in a meaningful manner, we gain the ability to mix-and-match as 
needed to find what really is the best.

David Lang