[sugar] Release schedule and process

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 13.05.2008, at 19:33, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:

> 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.


I pretty much agree with that. With the exception of activities that  
Ben listed there is no reason to include more in Sugar itself.

For example the browse activity - this endorses one specific browser  
implementation, it pulls in one huge chunk of code, etc. It is likely  
that if hooks are added for opening URLs that they are specific to  
that one browse implementation. If there were several browsers,  
developers were forced to agree on some API. Competition is good, so  
we should not pick one flavor over another.

IMHO it is better to clearly separate the core from the activities.  
This also forces clean interfaces, you cannot as easily chicken-out  
when breaking the API (and silently fixing the included activities).  
We want to encourage third-party activity development, keeping the  
"core" as small as possible seems beneficial to me.

- Bert -