On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 12:04:29PM -0500, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > I asked for specific use cases.
I apologize if I was inadequately specific in my previous email. As I alluded to before, three specific groups who I am confident would benefit from the ability to install RPMs via a USB-based customization process include: a) Walter and the teachers he's training, who would like an easy way to install gnuchess, since Gcompris doesn't yet bundle it. b) Individuals with large numbers of unreliably-networked laptops who would like to install carefully chosen and tested software on them en-masse, e.g. Bryan Berry and OLE Nepal. c) Individuals like me (and you?) who want a convenient way to install a fixed software overlay on top of whatever recent build they are presented with. > I'm not interested in supporting risky things that are unnecessary but > "might be nice somehow". First a disclaimer - I'm going to ask what may be a couple of dumb questions because I really want to better understand your position. My question is simply: were you speaking on behalf of the entire OLPC development community, the OLPC-employed software team, or really, solely, for yourself? If the last (which I'll assume since I take it to be the literal meaning of your statement): a) why would you feel that you, personally, are supporting arbitrary 'risky things' that someone else thought were good ideas? (particularly when they go to the effort of developing, testing, and submitting a patch in order to offer everyone the opportunity to reach their own judgment of the merits of the proposal?) b) given that you currently feel this way, have you considered changing your feelings by letting the role of 'human firewall' fall on some different, perhaps larger set of shoulders, for example, those of the design- and code-review community whose help I solicited by publishing my first email? Sincerely, Michael _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel