Please update etoys in 8.2.1

[david at lang.hm]

On Thu, 5 Feb 2009, Ed McNierney wrote:

> 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.

so after the 8.2.1 release the plan is to just switch to standard Linux 
distros?

it's one thing to skip the Q2 2009 release becouse you do a Q1 2009 
release. saying that there is no replacement for it strongly implies that 
the Q4 2009 release (or future releases) are not expected to happen either 
(otherwise the next one planned would be the 'replacement' for the Q2 2009 
release

it's not even that I think it's necessarily a bad move to make (I've 
ranted frequently enough about my disappointment with the OLPC software 
stack), but I would have expected this sort of thing to make major news 
(unfortunantly, probably with headlines like 'OLPC halts linux 
development')

is this the sort of thing that NN was alluding to when he announce the 
downsizing and future plans and emphisised the possibility of Sugar on 
Windows?

David Lang

> 	- 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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>