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

[Martin Langhoff]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
>> So no XS in place?
>
> The repair lab is not nearby any of the schools.

Ah - ok. Thanks for clarifying.

>> Downstreams that go to deployment (OLPC!) want to wait until a release
>> is reasonably well tested and stabilised.
>
> We have a chicken-and-egg problem: deployments have to participate in
> testing (and development), otherwise no bugs will ever be fixed.

Agreed. You can do what you are doing (run a school on newish sw, get
a tight feedback & bugfix loop) when someone like you is there.

> Letting volunteer children and teachers test the software has been
> incredibly productive.

Yes -- but we gotta remember that it's productive (specially for
Sugar) because you are there. You can turn their frustration into
valuable info (and bugfixes). Without you, it's just frustration.

> I wish I could have started one month earlier, so
> there would have been enough time to fix most problems before schools
> reopened in LatAm.

That's a good idea -- try to work in a school with "latest" Sugar late
in the previous school year, to incorporate stuff for the wider
deployment in the over-summer-holidas upgrade.

(And actually we have a late-starting deployment in La Rioja, which is
on-time to take advantage of that work.)

> I filed a few real bugs last week, and this week I'll spend a few full
> days side by side with the trainers to see what issues are still
> bothering them.

That's fantastic.

> Which dev team?

That's truly a good question. I'll say "the teams closest to the
deployments". "Distant" upstreams (kernel, udev, Fedora) don't care
directly about our end users. OLPC/SLers are passionate about children
learning.

>> Yep. You could make it a "major / minor" pair. So you only have one
>> LTS per year.
> One year of slack between development and user release would be ideal.

Yep - that and combine it with working with a few schools on recent
releases, with a developer on-site -- like you, Simon and others are
doing.

In practice, it probably means we'll be answering questions about any
release for about 1.5 to 2 years after the release date.

 > By LTS, I thought you meant 5 years :-)

Noooo. I'm not so crazy. But we have to fit in the school's
1-year-cycle, have time to stabilise, etc. Small deployments have more
flexibility, and when someone like you is literally on site you can go
wild... (take advantage of that!) but for the thousands of other
schools an LTS

cheers,


m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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