[Debian-olpc-devel] sugar debian stuff

[Andres Salomon]

On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:48:39 +0100
Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:

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> Hi Andres (cc'ing the OLPC list at Alioth),
> 
> On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 02:51:44PM -0500, Andres Salomon wrote:
> >I maintain a Debian distribution for the XO (called DebXO - 
> >http://wiki.laptop.org/go/DebXO).  One of the desktops that is
> >created is a Sugar desktop.  I'm emailing for the following reasons:
> >
> >1) I'd like to know your plans for 0.82 packages.  Are you going to
> >leave 0.81 in lenny, or attempt to get 0.82 into it?
> 
> Lenny is frozen. I do not expect newer releases to automagically
> enter Lenny, and I do not intend to spend time convincing the release
> team to pin newer releases, except for cases of security issues.
> 
> You are most welcome to do such convincing: A good argument might be 
> that the Sugar packages has no reverse dependencies (except for a
> single metapackage for debian-edu which I suspect is of no use with
> the current state of Sugar packages).
> 
> If you want to do this, then you should probably wait a bit, until
> all activity packages are corrected, as they currently are all
> wrongly installed below /usr/share/<activity> instead of the correct 
> /usr/share/sugar/<activity>.
> 
> 
> >2) Holger Levson worked on the DebXO Sugar desktop, but he's
> >currently pretty busy.  I was hoping to convince you to try out
> >DebXO and get you involved in development.  I noticed your
> >frustration with the Ubuntu Sugar folks; having an
> >easy-to-use/install Debian system is a great response to comments
> >about Ubuntu on the XO!  :)
> 
> I would appreciate if you would engage in the common packaging effort 
> for Debian, which should be beneficial for _any_ deb-based derived 
> distribution.
> 
> I find it most effective to spend reusable time on the "mother"
> distro than on any specific derivative.
> 
> It won't calm me down to work on _another_ derivative: 
> 
> My frustration is about recognition of the structure of the "mother"
> of deb-based distros, so won't (in itself) be helped by working on
> yet another derivative.
> 
> That said, I am not "against" Ubuntu or DebXO. I have not yet looked 
> closely at DebXO, and depending on its design choices I might find 
> interesting to devote time directly on it. But not (currently, at
> least) in favor of working directly on Debian, and there is still
> some pending work there.

I'm not attempting to convince you to fork the packages for DebXO;
that goes against what I'm trying to do with it.  You'll note that
DebXO uses all stock Debian (Lenny) packages with the exception of
4 packages which are necessary (for now) to be forked (kernel,
initramfs, xorg-video-geode, and ofw-config).   Once Lenny releases,
the plan is to use backports.org to pull newer packages into DebXO.

Since you're not planning on doing updates on current Lenny, I'll just
have to wait for testing to open up again and then start uploading things
to the bpo repository.


> 
> I would love for you to get involved in the shared packaging efforts
> at Alioth: Currently I do most of the work there, but Alioth is now
> on the radar of the Ubuntu Sugar developers and we are attempting to
> tune into each other at the moment. Would be great if you DebXO
> people (are you more that one?) could join as well, either just
> participate on the mailinglist, but preferrably do your packaging in
> the Gits I have created there.
> 

There are more than one; we're on #debxo @ OFTC.  I believe Holger has
already been working on Debian Sugar stuff.

> 
> What do you think?

I don't use Sugar, which is why I'm asking for other people's help in
this matter.  

> 
> And have I perhaps somehow misunderstood your request? What more 
> specifically did you have in mind that in your opinion made more
> sense to do in the DebXO camp directly than shared across distros at
> Alioth?

I'm not asking for custom Sugar packages for DebXO; I'm asking for
another person's help in testing the DebXO Sugar desktop, ensuring
that the package list is correct
( http://lunge.mit.edu/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=xodist;a=blob;f=sugar.packages;h=4fe06e0051cc8715efe7d68d9240f0ed91cd943e;hb=HEAD ), 
making sure everything is configured properly by default, etc.  Of
course, any additional DebXO work is appreciated.

> 
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
>     - Jonas
> 
> 
> P.S.
> 
> Please follow-up to the Alioth list rather than privately: 
> debian-olpc-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org

It is generally poor form to CC a mailing list quoting a private email
unless you've asked if it's okay.