[sugar] Release schedule and process

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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Edward Cherlin wrote:
| Those of us planning for a
| next-generation textbook want to know for sure
| what software they can count on. Otherwise, every active document will
| have to be packaged with dependencies.

You cannot count on any software other than the shell itself.  The Sugar
design does not support inter-item dependencies, and explicitly allows the
user to delete any Activity, independently of any other.

You are welcome to propose a dependency mechanism, but we have had this
discussion many times, and you are unlikely to discover the magic bullet
that avoids the pitfalls of UI complexity, bundle identity, versioning,
and location.  Rather than attempt to solve this hard technical problem,
you are much better off simply avoiding dependencies.

In the particular case of "software textbooks", this is really not an
issue.  If your textbook suggests exercises in a particular group of
Activities, it should say so on the first page.  You should not feel the
need to limit your scope to some default set; rather, you should provide
copies of all the ancillary Activities for download along with your
textbook.  You can even include copies of those Activities as .xo bundles
inside the textbook, like the Library does.  Free redistribution is one of
the beautiful things about free software.

- --Ben
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