Re: [Gnash-dev] Re: Gnash + OLPC

[Rob Savoye]

John Gilmore wrote:

> OLPC support has not gotten high priority from the gnash team, and I
> wonder why not.  Whose bugs and feature requests should get higher
> priority?  We have a few funders, and their desires deserve respect.

  It's simple. None of the Gnash developers checks the OLPC bug list,
just like we don't check Ubuntu's, Fedora's, OpenBSD's, etc... And for
whatever reason, almost nobody from OLPC has filed bugs in the Gnash bug
tracking. We can't check the bug lists of every distribution we want to
support, it's just too much work. We prefer people report bugs in the
Gnash bug tracking system, where usually things get dealt with
reasonably efficiently. I believe most of the bugs in trac for the OLPC
have been dealt with, and the few filed in the Gnash bug list by OLPC
users have also been fixed. So it's not like it's getting no support at all.

> constraints, OLPC users are our biggest user base, and I think they
> deserve better support from the team.  And OLPC is a strategic wedge
> for us; if we can keep Adobe out of the distro indefinitely, by

  I think Ubuntu users are likely a bigger installed base for Gnash, but
we should still support the XO. It's a shame Nicholas is trying to wreck
his own project, but the OLPC is still a great idea, and the XO is
definitely some cool hardware.

>> of the pain in trying to get sound in Gnash to work on XO's latest
>> signed test OS build (767) (which will be the basis for the stable
>> build 8.20 which will come shipped in the upcoming XO units that will
>> ship in the new Give 1 Get 1 program that's going to run this
>> November).

  I just got candidate-767 up on an XO after unbricking it, I'm doing
some fresh builds to see if this is still a problem with trunk. I'll use
stock tools, instead of my Geode optimized toolchain.

> Right.  I reported such a sound problem to the gnash team last week,
> but nobody jumped on it.

  Because nobody can reproduce it... It seems to be an XO specific
problem, and I'm the only one with any XO hardware. I didn't jump on it,
cause my newer XO was bricked, so nothing happened. If we're to track
down bugs on the XO that are specific to that platform, some of the
other Gnash developers could use an XO, so it doesn't have to wait for me.

> OLPC is shipping the very latest public release of gnash, in a
> customized RPM built by the gnash project leader (Rob).  OLPC's

  I don't build the rpms for the OLPC, Dennis does. Last I checked it
had been updated to something more recent, but still somewhat out of
date. Hopefully that can be fixed when the next Gnash release goes out,
which should be very soon. I can make my snapshots available for testing
if the sound problem is fixed.

> the cvs/git/bzr/whatever trunk version of gnash, it's time to bend your
> efforts toward cutting a release.  At the moment, the snapshots don't
> even build on most platforms.

  We are in a release cycle, mostly now we're just beating the bugs out
of the new xpcom support. Everything else for 0.8.4 is in trunk. It's
looking to be a good release.

        - rob -