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

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 11:51, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 16:03 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
>> 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.
> [...]
>> 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.
>
> Indeed :-(
>
> I'm trying to get everyone on IRC and mailing lists before I leave. In
> Nepal it worked, but here the language barrier is higher.
>
> I told everyone that Spanish is welcome in bug reports, blog posts and
> for chatting on #sugar. Many of our core developers speak Spanish
> fluently, so they could bridge information to the others.
>
> Admittedly, it's not working: people come to IRC, they see that everyone
> speaks English, and shy away. I don't believe in breaking the community
> apart in many per-language ghettos, but Spanish probably has enough
> critical mass to justify a #sugar-es (or #olpc-es) channel.

I have invested efforts in the past in that direction, but they
haven't taken off. We have sugar-desarrollo and we used to have a
channel as well, but haven't seen much use.

If we had a deployment team, we could try to make a push so that
people from different deployments talk together in an open space...

Regards,

Tomeu

>> 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.)
>
> Cool! A lot of stuff is moving forward here:
>
> * This Monday we'll have another meeting with the "formadores" to help
>   them file complete and understandable bug reports without the need
>   for us to go on-site.
>
> * We're now tracking the remaining bugs here:
>   http://wiki.paraguayeduca.org/index.php/Devel/Builds/Todo
>
> * Two more developers of the Paraguay Educa technical team are learning
>   to create OS builds. Next week, they'll start helping out with
>   activities.
>
> * The formadores (teacher trainers) got used to the differences
>   in the new software release and are no longer diffident.
>
>
>> 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 - 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.
>
> Yes, we definitely need more errant developers! Since there's a limited
> amount of core developers in OLPC and SL, in the future we may want to
> encourage deployments to exchange developers. The Paraguayan team now
> employs hackers with two years of experience. The same is probably true
> in Uruguay.
>
> It would be great if one of them could travel to the fledgling
> Argentinian deployment and help them build capacity locally. A
> decentralized model of international collaboration would solve the
> scalability problem.
>
>
>> In practice, it probably means we'll be answering questions about any
>> release for about 1.5 to 2 years after the release date.
>
> Interestingly, Mark Shuttleworth has recently argued for a 2 years cycle
> synchronized across all the enterprise distributions:
>
>  http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/290
>
> If his proposal acquires enough momentum within the community, it would
> make sense for us to synchronize with it, solving the issue of being
> left behind by the rest of the development community.
>
>
>> 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
>
> Testing and stabilize a new version of Fedora and Sugar on the XO could
> be done with as little as a few thousand students in a small town, with
> just 1-2 developers on site.
>
> After we're done with Sugar 0.84, I'll try to repeat the development
> cycle for Sugar 0.88 and Fedora 12, starting with few adventurous
> volunteers such as the Scratcheros.
>
> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>
>
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