Please update etoys in 8.2.1

[Ed McNierney]

David -

The "9.1" release was a very specific release planned for the first  
half of 2009 - see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 for one set of  
details - following OLPC's stated plan of two major releases per  
calendar year.  That specific event is not going to happen.  That's  
not at all the same thing as saying "OLPC will never do another  
software release again".  OLPC will not undertake, on its own, another  
major release of the software package we currently ship with each XO.   
Several things are happening, however:

1. An 8.2.1 release is nearing completion, and I expect OLPC will  
continue to produce minor feature-driven point releases (8.2.2, 8.2.3)  
as needed to support our deployments.  This is in contrast to our  
previous plan of schedule-driven major releases twice a year (of which  
9.1 would be the next).

2. Several people are working actively with the Fedora community to  
ensure that Fedora 11 works as well as possible on the XO.  Sugar will  
be an available desktop environment on F11 as it is in F10.  Some  
users and/or deployments may choose to use F11 on their machines  
instead of 8.2.1,

3. Other distributions (DebXO, Ubuntu, etc.) in various shapes and  
sizes are available for the XO, and I haven't heard any sign that  
those activities will end.  I hope these will continue to offer  
additional alternative solutions for XO users; one size does not fit  
all.

The specific discussion about etoys is that originally 8.2.1 was  
planned as a more limited bug-fix release, with a major release coming  
shortly afterwards, so it made sense for major etoys updates to wait  
for the 9.1 release.  Since the contemplated 9.1 release will not  
happen, and since some of the original customer-driven schedule  
pressure for 8.2.1 has gone away, it seems to now make sense to  
include the planned etoys update in 8.2.1 instead in order to make the  
update available to as many of our users as possible as quickly as  
possible.

	- Ed


On Feb 5, 2009, at 11:32 PM, david at lang.hm wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
>> Dear Release Manager,
>>
>> as we discussed on IRC today (and which I had not realized until
>> today) the 8.2.1 release will be pre-installed on XOs for much longer
>> than anticipated, since the 9.1 release has been canceled, and no
>> replacement is in sight.
>
> this is the first I've seen about 9.1 being canceled.
>
> if this is the case (and especially with no replacement planned),  
> what is
> the plan for XO software going forward?
>
> David Lang
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