[Debian-olpc-devel] Fwd: sugar

[Jordan Mantha]

Thanks for the CC Jani,

As the "squeak guy" in Ubuntu I'd like to take this opportunity to say 
that I would love to see as much collaboration with Debian as possible. 
My particular problem is that I'm not a squeak user so I don't even know 
what to test sometimes or what "typical users" would like. I would 
personally like to hand off looking after squeak in Ubuntu to somebody 
more qualified. There seem to be a few good squeak bug reporters in 
Ubuntu and I've thought of forming a Squeak Team to look after it 
properly. Perhaps some joint Debian/Ubuntu team could be worked out.

As to the Ubuntu 8.04 packages, as José has pointed out there are some 
issues with my 3.9-8 packages. The browser plugin doesn't seem to work 
very well on 64-bit machines and it is perhaps not as "desktop 
friendly". They are based off the squeak.org Debian repo packages that 
Matej Kosik is maintaining as I was unaware José's squeak-vm package 
until after I'd already done a lot of work on the squeak.org packages 
and had been working with Matej and Lex Spoon for a while on them.

Since the current stable release of squeak VM is 3.9-8 I used that. As 
far as I know there is no official 3.9-12 release and the Debian package 
is just a svn snapshot, which made me a little nervous for our Long Term 
Support release. My plan was to try to get ahold of José during the 8.10 
development cycle and get things worked out.

The 3.9-12 squeak-vm did not work at all on 64bit for me. It just 
segfaulted, whereas my 3.9-8 packages (which include image and source 
packages) at least seem to work other than the plugin. My guess from 
reading José's comments below is that there must be some bug that was 
making it segfault for me rather than truly not supporting 64bit. I only 
have one 64bit machine to test on unfortunately and didn't have a lot of 
time because of our imminent release.

So that's why I went with 3.9-8 packages for Ubuntu 8.04. Unfortunately, 
I also inadvertently also included the epoch from the squeak.org 
packages which is going to be a problem for syncing between Debian and 
Ubuntu. We'll have to work that out. I for sure want Ubuntu to stick as 
close as possible to Debian.

-Jordan

Jani Monoses wrote:
> Thanks for the clarifications José!
> 
> In Ubuntu, squeak is in multiverse - the non-free arhive component so dfsg
> is not an issue for it.
> I know etoys is not dependent on sugar, but for sugar they have an activity
> that wraps and calls etoys.
> It looks like that is the only thing that needs doing by the olpc team, the
> rest is pure squeak.
> 
> I am Cc-ing the Edubuntu developer who took care of Squeak in Ubuntu just to
> keep him posted even though he is busy too (Hi Jordan!)
> 
> Jani
> 
> PS: as I am not subscribed to debian-olpc-devel please keep me in the cc as
> well in future posts. Thanks.
> 
> On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 10:58 AM, José L. Redrejo Rodríguez <
> jredrejo at edu.juntaextremadura.net> wrote:
> 
>> El mié, 02-04-2008 a las 10:31 +0300, Jani Monoses escribió:
>>> And here's a second one. I was hoping we can have the same set of
>>> packages for debian and ubuntu,
>>> but apparently wrote too late, as you guys seem to have dona and
>>> uploaded quite a few already :)
>>>
>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>> From: Jani Monoses <jani.monoses at gmail.com>
>>> Date: Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 10:46 PM
>>> Subject: Re: sugar
>>> To: Holger Levsen <holger at layer-acht.org>
>>> Cc: Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk>
>>>
>>>
>>> Hello guys,
>>>
>>> squeak-vm has just landed in Ubuntu Hardy so I'll be looking into
>>> packaging etoys.
>>>
>>> What I am asking you is to try look at my existing packages for sugar
>>> and activities and reuse them for Debian.
>>> It will save us duplication of work and allow us to cooperate and
>>> avoid spurious deltas in the future.
>>>
>>> Here's a list albeit with some false positives of packages that have
>>> sugar in their names:
>>>
>>> https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+search?text=sugar
>>>
>>>
>>>         etoys is the squeak-vm package, already in Debian. "Modified
>>>         evince" means
>>>         evince with a sugar ui?
>>>
>>> etoys is a separate image for the squeak VM from my limited knowledge
>>> of all things squeak so far.
>>
>> Hi, Jani
>> I'm the maintainer of the squeak-vm package in Debian. I'll meet Jonas
>> tomorrow and we can talk about these things, but, previously, maybe you
>> should know some things:
>> -squeak-vm in Debian is version 3.9-12, but in Ubuntu is 3.9-8
>> - This version difference is very important, as 3.9-8 has a non-dfsg
>> license, so it can not be in Debian (don't know about the Ubuntu
>> policies, but that vm is a total non-free package)
>> - Version 3.9-12 in Debian works with 64 bits, but 3.9-8 does not, the
>> patch ubuntu maintainers have added is not enough, some plugins still
>> fail.
>> - Version 3.9-8 is not "olpc" ready
>> - Debian package is much more desktop-friendly, thinking of
>> non-technical users, Ubuntu package is more developper friendly (I know
>> pretty well ubuntu package because it's based on the work I did for the
>> gnulinex package 5 years ago. They have removed it now from the
>> changelog, but if you look at squeak-vm changelog in gutsy you still can
>> see the linex references and my name)
>>
>> About the etoys packaging:
>> - My intention is packaging e-toys as a squeak-image, and doing the same
>> with other squeak images that are around. So, etoys should provide
>> squeak-image, squeak-image-3.10 should provide squeak-image ,
>> squeakland-image should provide squeak-image, educarex-image should
>> provide squeak-image, and so on.
>> - No one of these images can go to Debian yet, as the relicencing
>> process of the image has not finished, and thus, they are not DFSG
>> compatible yet. I'm afraid that won't happen before 8 or 9 months.
>>
>> I like the olpc project, but at the moment my only relation with it is
>> my squeak focus. For me, olpc etoys are just another squeak image, and I
>> don't think they have any sugar relation as you don't need sugar to run
>> it. I'll add to the squeak-vm package the dbus plugin needed to run on
>> the olpc, but can also be used in a non-olpc machine, so I won't package
>> any special thing for sugar. All the squeak stuff will be like any other
>> Debian package.
>>
>> In the future I plan to be more involved helping in the debian olpc
>> project, as soon as my current work load allows it, but not for the
>> squeak part, as it's not a sugar thing and that will follow his own way.
>>
>> I hope my position is clear now.
>> Best regards.
>> José L.
>>
>>