[Sugar-devel] Future of Rainbow + Sugar?

[Peter Robinson]

>> To me, Bitfrost was just one more lofty windmill OLPC tried to tilt because
>> it seemed like an interesting challenge.  I'm not clear why Sugar needs more
>> protection from rogue activities than a normal desktop environment has from
>> rogue applications.
>> Reinventing the desktop as a constructivist learning environment is a big
>> enough task for one development team / community to swallow.  Reinventing
>> security is an altogether separate cause.
>> That said, Rainbow exists, so we don't need to do anything to remove it.  So
>> long as people step up to maintain it and help activity developers fix the
>> issues they run into.
>
> Yeah, that's a very important point. I think we already know the kind
> of issues we can expect to find and maybe should think twice before
> throwing out all that knowledge.
>
> I don't see Rainbow in Sugar as too controversial, because:
>
> - the modifications needed to the Sugar platform are minimal,

The changes to sugar might be minimal but the changes to the
underlying OS are not so simple.

>From my (which is very basic) understanding there is patches to at
least the kernel, initscripts, upstart and telepathy and possibly dbus
to support rainbow. This makes it very hard to use it in a standard
distro environment especially where Fedora (for example) already uses
SELinux to implement some of the features of rainbow.

Peter