[sugar] Release schedule and process

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 7:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>  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.

I think it's useful to separate distribution and development when
discussing this.

You are discussing several distribution models. Some of them goes
through a no-activities state during the process, but all of them
include activities in their final form (unless for the distro case you
are thinking to start clean and let the user select the activities he
wants).

To me including activities in the coordinated development process has
two main advantages:

1 It gives distributors a complete product they can customize and
extend for their users.
2 It makes developers work on a concrete, complete product, rather
than on a set of libraries and services.

Activities are our strength. Putting a bunch of them at the core of
our development processes is the best way to ensure they get the
attention they need.

Marco