[Server-devel] Interesting opportunity to study upstream - downstream relationship Was: Root fs on XO1

[David Farning]

The is an example of the opportunities and potential challenges that
can occur between the community and the Association. This is why I was
very pleased that the XSCE-XS thread last week shifted to
clarification.

The motivations and drives behind community volunteer decisions can be
very different than the motivations and drives behind the decisions of
an Association employee. As expressed in this thread, when working
with large and remote deployments, the Association must be very risk
adverse. Sending a qualified engineer to diagnose and fix a flakey SD
card can take days... during which time their reputation takes a
beating. I have some experience wearing those shoes :(

Hackers like George and Mikus, who have the time and talent to drive
XSCE forward, are much less risk averse. They can swap SD cards and
reboot in a couple of seconds... while they take a break to refill
their coffee :)

The question becomes how can the community and Association work
together to encourage innovative and useful work, while providing
backstops to prevent fragile code from entering the OLPC support
pipeline. My suggestion is to think of the relationship between XSCE
and the Association as a funnel rather than a pipeline. XSCE will have
a lot of ideas. The modular structure of XSCE enables all these ideas,
both the good and the bad, to coexist. Over time, the good ones will
raise to the top.

Some examples of this in practice at the community level:
1. Each feature in XSCE is developed in a branch. When the core
developers are happy with the quality they agree to merge it into
master:
2. Each feature must pass basic 'smoke tests' before being included in
the release notes.

It might be useful for an organization like the Association to take a
subset of XSCE (include only the bits you trust and need) and run some
additional layers of QA before endorsing it as a product. As long as
we can focus on 'the funnel' and our areas of overlapping interest
without getting too caught up in our differences, it is likely the
project will add value to both the community and the Association.

This example is particularly important to me. As one of the tireless
trio -- consisting of Jerry, George, and Tim. George has done the
lion's share of the development on XSCE.

Due to his experience and ability to clearly communicate, I bookmark a
embarrassing number emails written by James so that I can 're-ask' the
questions during key parts of the decision making process.

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 6:04 PM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 09, 2013 at 08:31:27AM -0500, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
>> On 08/09/2013 06:17 AM, James Cameron wrote:
>> >I have never been happy with using the
>> >XO-1 SD card slot.
>>
>> I have been using SD cards in the XO-1 SD card slot for more than
>> five years now.  Although I have experienced occasions of SD card
>> corruption, they have been so rare as to not affect what I've been
>> doing with my XO-1 systems (I just "clean" the SD card and keep on
>> using it).  In those five years I have had maybe five SD card
>> failures (the SD card stops responding electrically) out of a pool
>> of about 40 cards -- I consider my SD cards to have provided me
>> "acceptable reliability". [Contrast that with my experience with
>> XO-1.5 systems - four out of ten failed (admittedly, the failures
>> were early systems).]
>
> Yes, you have gone through the effort of finding 35 out of 40 cards
> capable of operating well with the faulty hardware.  ;-)  That's
> something that an XSCE deployer probably can't afford, especially if
> the site is remote.
>
>> By providing a swap partition on the SD card, I've been able to run
>> *large* Linux applications (e.g., BOINC, gvSIG) on the XO-1, despite
>> its limited main memory (I run them from Terminal in the Sugar
>> environment, and live with the limited multi-window capability
>> provided by Sugar). What I place on the SD card is executables
>> (e.g., Adobe, Java, Browsers, Sugar Activities (3GB+), Timidity) and
>> data (mainly accessed through Terminal - Movies, Books, Music,
>> Images, Maps, etc.).
>>
>> Without my 'permanent' SD card. the XO-1 would be "too little" for
>> me.
>
> I agree swap can be very useful.  I like swap over network block
> device using USB ethernet.  The size of the swap can be unlimited (a
> sparse file), additional swap spaces can be added as needed, there's
> no worry about SD card compatibility, and no worry about endurance of
> FLASH in the card or USB drive.  Sustainability.
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Swap#Swap_to_network_block_device
>
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com