[sugar] Release schedule and process

Tue May 13 13:33:11 EDT 2008

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Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
| 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.

Could you name an example of such an Activity?

It seems to me that the presence of any such Activity represents a design
bug in Sugar.  In the case of Chat and Journal, these are known design
bugs.  Chat will eventually be rendered mostly obsolete by pervasive
overlay chat, and the Journal is planned to be merged into the Sugar
interface itself.

The question of whether activities are included "by default" refers either
to prefabricated disk images or packages for distros like Fedora and
Ubuntu.  Regarding disk images, the answer is clear: do both.  We should
have minimal disk images, with just the Sugar base, and also demo images
with all the activities we think someone might want.

Determining what to do in the case of packages for other distros, the
situation is much muddier.  The plan for Activity packaging is designed
around the idea of thousands of unknown authors writing code that installs
and runs with minimal privileges.  Users will be able to install multiple
distinct activities with the same name, distinguished by cryptographic
authorship and history, upgrade or downgrade them, and modify their source
code, all without superuser access.  It's already difficult to harmonize
this with yum/rpm and apt/deb, and it's only going to get harder with the
new Activity bundle system.  I think our best option is to let Sugar
retain control of Activity installation, even when running on a system
with its own package management.

- --Ben
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