[sugar] Release schedule and process

[Walter Bender]

Ah. I was missing a subtly: do we agree that activities can be
released on their own timeframe, but that some activities are released
with the Sugar releases? For example, Write could be updated whenever
the Abiword team feels it is appropriate, perhaps in sync with other
Abiword releases, but a Sugar release would always include a working
Write? Is this the Gnome model?

In some cases, there is more than one choice for a core activity:
there are at least three credible Draw programs at the moment. Which
one is folded into the Sugar release is an interesting
question--somewhat different from the question of what are core
activities. Michael and Scott's Customization process takes care of
some aspects of both of these questions, but it doesn't address the
question of whether or not Sugar would issue a release that was
incompatible with *any* Draw activity.

-walter

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
> On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 6:24 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > I think we need to decouple the release cycles between activities and
>  >  Sugar to whatever degree possible. Activities should be able to change
>  >  at whatever pace is dictated by the activity developers. Since
>  >  activities depend upon Sugar, the Sugar schedule needs to be more
>  >  predictable. The only time it seems there would be a conflict is when
>  >  an incompatible change in a Sugar module is made, which, with the
>  >  emerging process, is hopefully rare and well known in advance.
>  >
>  >  Note that the above says nothing about what constitutes a "core"
>  >  activity. But we do want to make sure we are not leaving activity
>  >  developers in the dust as we make changes. Sugar without activities is
>  >  not very interesting.
>
>  I agree that limiting the number of components released as a whole
>  brings important benefits. I think that the idea of releasing some
>  activities as part of Sugar is because they provide "services" that
>  are considered a basic part of the user experience inside Sugar. I
>  think this is the reason why GNOME releases applications along with
>  "desktop components"?
>
>  Regards,
>
>  Tomeu
>