[Server-devel] Clarifying some XSCE issues.

[David Farning]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 2:18 AM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 04:34:08PM -0500, David Farning wrote:
>>  After a couple of eventful, and fruitful, weeks with XSCE, I would
>> like to to clarify a few points where our message seemed to be
>> unclear.
>>
>> -- Emphasis on small deployments. As a community, there is currently
>> an emphasis towards small deployments. Due to their limited
>> bureaucracies, we have been able to establish very quick turnaround
>> times for feedback and fixes. This has enabled us to keep our rate of
>> development quite high.
>>
>> The design and implementation of XSCE should scale from 1 school to
>> 100,000 schools. There is currently an "Ansible rewrite"  (
>> http://www.ansibleworks.com/docs/ ) in process. We believes that the
>> use of ansible as a configure management tool has the potential to
>> reduce the maintenance required at large deployments. A team of
>> developers at AC is working on this now with the goal of landing in
>> the beginning of the 0.5 release cycle
>>
>> -- Emphasis on ARM. XSCE runs on any hardware which runs Fedora 18.
>> The current releases heavily favored XOs because they were a logical
>> starting point from a Quality Assurance perspective. Debugging is an
>> order of magnitude easier when testers and developers are running the
>> same equipment. Starting with XOs enabled us to focus on school server
>> developments rather than hardware quirks.
>>
>> Each quarterly release we have added additional hardware types. This
>> is allowing the project to scale gradually to more and more device
>> types without overwhelming developers and testers.
>>
>> -- Core OS. The decisions to base on Fedora was not taken lightly. If
>> we wanted to run on XO-4s we had to run on a recent Fedora. The second
>> issue is the fact that most of  the interesting low powered servers
>> are ARM based.
>>
>> Moving forward, our goal is to use the flexibility of the ansible
>> provisioning system to be able to configure XSCE on fedora and CentOS.
>> On an interesting note, we have been contacted by a team of ARM on
>> CentOS developers who offered to work with us to get CentOS a a couple
>> of ARM based servers.
>>
>> -- Our goals is not to tell anyone what they should do. We have
>> avoided discussions on public lists such as this to avoid the
>> temptation for people to tell us what to do... or for us to tell them
>> what to do. Instead, we have focused on adding value.
>>
>> We hope to add value to the ecosystem. We hope that adding value earns
>> us influence. In exchange we invite people to participate in the XSCE
>> project by adding value. That value will help them earn influence
>> within the project.
>>
>> I hope this help clarify some of the issues that have come up over the
>> past couple of days.
>
> Not really, since those issues mainly had to do with OLPC.

I am sorry. I don't have any first hand knowledge of the incident it
Jamica. My interest in that incident was moving past blame to finding
a way to move forward in a way which reduces that type of confusions
in the future. Samuel's email combined with the wiki templates did
that well

> but I do
> think your write-up could be better placed by merging it with the
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Community_Edition article.

+1. Now that we understand where we failed to communication
effectively, we will try to take step to improve that communication.
Those step will include improving the wiki.

-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com