joyride, staging builds, sugar releases

[Daniel Drake]

2009/2/12 victor <Victor.Lazzarini at nuim.ie>:
> Sorry to insist on this, but I have not got it quite yet.
>
> Joyrides => obsolete (even though the builder script keeps
> churning them out and telling the olpc devel list).

Obsolete, but not really obsoleted by anything usable *yet*.

> staging => what are these? Obsolete too?

This is where we are staging changes to be used in v8.2.1.

> release builds => only last week there was a release build
> announced on the olpc devel list. Are these obsolete too?

You are referring to the v8.2.1 candidate release? This is not
obsolete, it is being pushed to various deployments.

> And another thing: olpc-update is not to be used anymore,
> or is it still on?

It is still on for v8.2. It's future is perhaps a bit uncertain (maybe
once we have working pure-Fedora builds it won't be active for a
while, but it possibly will be resuscitated or replaced in future).


I think the real question is: who are you developing for?

v8.2 is pretty frozen and slow moving  - the upcoming 8.2.1 includes
only a handful of fixes (plus a couple of features for much improved
deployability, that do not really affect the user experience). It will
be adopted by deployments over the next few months, and will continue
to be rolled out for probably a long time (e.g. Uruguay still using
build 656 even though development terminated a long time ago).
There may be an 8.2.2 with a similar collection of small fixes,
depending on demand from deployments.

If you want to develop for these deployments on this timeline, then
you should work on top of 8.2 (sugar-0.82) and limit yourself to
activity-level changes only.


As for the future, the hope is that we will have a
similarly-functional OS that includes the latest version of sugar
asap. OLPC is working with Fedora on this, and while I suspect that
the end result will be pushed as a "reference OS" by OLPC, there are
also some other efforts which I think OLPC would probably be happy to
flash onto machines at the factory (I can't speak officially, I am
only a volunteer right now), including debXO, and a possibility of the
community taking the 8.2 OS release and adding sugar-0.84 and some
other things as an intermediate step before the pure-Fedora builds are
suitable replacements. However, I personally think that all of these
efforts are 6-12 months away (at least) from producing something
adoptable by deployments.

If you want to develop for the-future-with-unknown-timeframe, then you
should work upstream at sugarlabs for sugar-0.84.

Daniel