[sugar] Release schedule and process

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 6:32 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"?

Distributions will need ship a set of activities, as you say sugar
without activities is not interesting. Having them on a coordinated
schedule will make their life easier. I think we should aim at
releasing a product that makes some sense from the user experience
point of view. And Sugar without activities doesn't.

Also many features in the Sugar core will be developed for certain
activities. And many features can only be tested using activities.
Having a few of them on the same schedule makes this a lot easier.

Marco