What to expect from developers, are there any left? (was Re: rotate button sucks on the XO)

[Daniel Drake]

2009/3/2 NoiseEHC <NoiseEHC at freemail.hu>:
> Witch the recent disbanding of the development team I simply cannot see
> what will happen to the XO development. I mean that 8.2.1 will be
> released and 9.1.0 is dropped but what I do not understand is what will
> happen with all the development for 9.1.0? What I heard is that those
> will be pushed upstream (whatever that means) but it is not clear if
> reporting bugs or talking about button layouts on the game pad will
> result in a new software release or is just a waste of time. What I mean
> is that should I also subscribe to some Fedora devel list (note that I
> do not know sh*t about linux development, packaging or anything like
> that) to keep informed or what?

It is unlikely that you (as a user, rather than a deployment)
reporting bugs to OLPC will result in another software release *direct
from OLPC* (such as 8.2.2), because development of 8.2.x is mostly
discontinued and will really only be driven by deployments.


Have you read?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Future_releases

It may not answer all your questions but it is the most concrete
documentation that I have seen so far.

In terms of reporting bugs, the process of "upstreaming" everything
basically means that OLPC is no longer the distributor and that bugs
should be reported directly to the people who are "more responsible"
for the them.

What would you do if you ran Ubuntu on your main computer but some of
the buttons on your keyboard were not working correctly? You would
file a bug with Ubuntu, who would hopefully either fix the problem on
their own back, or help you to report the issue to the developers of
the related package (which would likely be one of the X.org input
components, in the case of keyboard troubles).

The same applies here -- install a distro on your XO and report bugs
to the distributor. I recommend Fedora through Chris's rawhide-xo
builds, bugzilla.redhat.com, and the fedora-olpc list.

> Currently I am writing a nice activity which teaches kids what to do
> when alien spaceships attacks Earth and it will take some time to
> finish. What should I do next?

Work with the relevant upstream component. In this case, you are
working on a sugar activity, so develop it as a platform-neutral
activity at sugarlabs.org, and work with sugarlabs' standard processes
of getting activities included in distributions.

Daniel