[sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship

[Walter Bender]

I must have missed the post you refer to. It has never been the
position of the core Sugar team--that I am aware of--to preclude the
running of standard Linux apps. We even went so far as to hire a
contractor to look at various ways to facilitate the running of
standard X apps last summer---although that work was never completed
or brought into the main branch.

Albert, among others, has shown that in fact it is not difficult to
wrap existing apps in a Sugar wrapper, but this is still one step away
from where we'd like to be. (Last summer's proposal was to be able to
switch back and forth to a non-Sugar desktop within the window
manager. Indeed, the discussion about investigating ion or awesome as
alternative window managers are in part intended to address this
issue.) That said, as John points out, there are some other
high-priority tasks, such as rewriting the Datastore--something Ivan
had been working on before he left--and working on improved
performance, as per Bernie's recent post.

So, let's see if we can do a better job for standard Linux apps than
Benjamin has recently done for Windows apps--you should try his Wine
activity. (Note that he made some deliberate--and probably
correct--trade-offs  by deciding to minimize any integration with the
Datastore, while keeping clipboard compatibility.

-walter

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 1:39 AM,  <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Apr 2008, Walter Bender wrote:
>
>
> >
> > > Sugar/Linux could easily have compatibility with regular Linux stuff,
> > > but this has been denied despite strong demand.
> > >
> >
> > Albert, saying that this has been "denied" is overstated. Was it a
> > priority in the beginning? No. Were some decisions made that make it
> > more difficult? Yes. But are people working towards this goal? Yes.
> >
>
>  I'll say that the impression that I have received as an outsider is that
> the people working on Sugar have not at all been interested in compatibility
> with normal linux software.
>
>  in fact there was a post within the last week claiming that it would be a
> bad idea to make sugar able to use unmodified linux software becouse that
> would mean that the educational software and activities being written for
> sugar could then be used on any linux box without sugar and this would mean
> the death of sugar. a couple of us responded that if sugar requires that
> sort of lock-in it deserved to die, but I don't remember anyone speaking up
> to say that the developers of sugar or the software team at OLPC disagreed
> with the initial poster.
>
>  I know that in an ideal world you would not have to speak up to deny each
> and every crazy statement that's made, but at this point there is so much
> uncertinty about what the attitudes really are (not to mention the problem
> of knowing who actually speaks with authority on many of these things) the
> reality is that everything that's incorrect needs to be responded, if only
> so others don't start quoting it incorrectly.
>
>  David Lang
>