[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 12:07 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> > If you ask me: our recent F11-XO1 builds have reached equal or better
> > quality than build 801, provided you disable automatic power management.
> 
> Are all activities working, including collaboration? In Gnome, can you
> actually use FF? Camera?


> 
> > Hopefully, they will complain a little less on the next upgrade to 0.86
> > and 0.88... Until they finally get used to the idea that software tends
> > to improve over time rather than getting worse.
> 
> Or we slow down to a rhythm that they can cope with ;-)!

Slowing down deployment of new versions might make things even worse!

The more changes accumulate, the less familiar the new version will look
like, and the more time the users got to get used to the experience
provided by the old version, no matter how buggy it was.

The Vista vs XP effect.

The only way to reduce user adversity to change is getting them used to
smooth change by providing a short development cycle with few changes
that deliver clear improvements to the user experience in terms of new
features or fewer bugs.

The #1 bait we used to push this new release onto teachers was 3G
support. Suffice saying, GSM connectivity is very popular in places with
no wired broadband.

Unfortunately, this wasn't quite true, bacause many popular Huawei
modems use by default a "Windows compatible" mode in which they show up
as mass-storage devices. After backporting udev to F-11, I found out
that now users are being sold an even newer model of Huawei modem which
is not yet supported by the Fedora 12 version of udev's rules.

Teachers blamed the new Sugar for breaking their shiny new modems: they
seem unable to distinguish between a regression, a bug in new feature,
or an entirely missing feature. Heh...

Anyway, now I found a temporary workaround and reported the missing
feature upstream:

  http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=573250

Too bad it was so easy: support for new devices would have maed a major
selling point for the next version of Fedora :-)

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/