[Server-devel] XSCE wants to become a framework for the next 10 years

[George Hunt]

Tony, et al,

The group of developers, working on the XSCE, are indeed attempting to
build upon the good work that Daniel Drake did on the XS-0.7. But we are
trying to extract the essential information from the history of the school
server up to this point.

   - The XS-0.6, based upon FC4, was released in the 2008 time frame.
   - Nepal, Australia, Uruguay, perhaps for their own and different
   reasons, deviated from this released version 2008-2012.
   - XS-0.7 was released for use in Nicaragua based upon Centos in early
   2012.

Our analysis of this history has been that the monolithic nature of the
punji, anoconda build process is not helpful.  If the functionality of the
school server could be dropped on top of a current fedora build, all of the
hardware specific configuration would be handled by the general Fedora
community -- our school server software doesn't need to change to
accomodate arm, or x64.

But as with any basic restructuring, starting from the ground up, we need
to walk before we can run.  Whether it is reinventing the wheel or not --
networking needs to work flawlessly. We have determined that one the the
hardware platforms we need to support is the XO itself. The XO uses
NetworkManager as it's networking frontend, so to be compatible, we have
needed to learn how to configure NM.  Squid, ejabberd, and iptables need to
play in all configurations of network adapters.

In addition, if we are thinking for the next 10 years, we wanted a more
modular plugin-like structure for adding additional services.

So I believe Tony, you are correct, we seem to be "reinventing the wheel".
But it's my hope we are getting this wheel ready to carry a much heavier
weight.  We are hoping that by the third quarter of this year, the XSCE
might be to the point where it is a drop in replacement for XS-0.7. At that
point your good suggestions might be extremely useful.

We are trying to provide a software framework that is attractive and
flexible enough, so that in the future, the next Nepal, Australia, Uruguay
will not feel the need to go their own way.

George
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/server-devel/attachments/20130228/f0e622d3/attachment.html>