[AG-TECH] Critical Python Bug Affecting AGTk 2.2

[Ivan R. Judson]

> On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 08:39:58AM -0500, Joshua M. Brown wrote:
> > Core 2, or Gentoo? i have people that put up a good deal of 
> money and 
> > purchased some very expensive equipment and it is stuck on AG1.x at 
> > this time because i have no idea what OS will be supported.
> 
> Support is a funny word with many different meanings.  I 
> don't know that anything in this project is really 
> "supported" in the sense that "I paid for this and you must 
> fix it".  Whatever the community develops on/for, will be 
> "supported" in the sense that it will likely run the best on 
> that platform.  Ivan was pretty clear that Fedora Core and 
> Gentoo were two such platforms that the community were working on.

Thanks Charles, I appreciate you're explaining this so clearly. The problems
we've been fighting are the result of the trade-offs of trying to be
non-volatile for the community, while making significant progress in
development of future versions of the software to include what the users
need/want. We have not performed as well as I think we could have, but we
are working on fixing that.

In terms of support, Charles makes good points above, in fact, we are a
small development team working on building a research platform. We're
supporting a set of production services, but that's not something we
actually receive any support to do, our support is all focused on developing
the research platform. 

> If you want a more concrete level of support, maybe InSors or 
> another company can provide that.
> 
> > i really do need a solid answer on:
> > 
> > 1) which distro?
> > 2) AG 2.3 - wait for that or move ahead with AG2.2
> 
> There will likely always be a newer one to look forward to... 
> at least as long as this project continues.  Newer generally 
> means less stable.

Ouch, and Ouch, and Yes :-). Here's where we are vectored at the moment, I
don't expect this to significantly change, but I can't comment yet on how
fast this will roll out either:

Windows - ANL Support
OS X - ANL Support
Linux:
	- Source Distribution - ANL Support
	- Gentoo - ANL Support
	- Fedora Core 2 - External Support
	- Slackware - External Support	
	
We'd love to see debian, suse, mandrake, and others, but we just don't have
the time yet to do them. There are external developers working on other
distributions (debian at least), but I can't guarantee support for them will
be soon.

We have built the software in a way that it should be able to be ported to a
new platform relatively easily (and we have examples that have shown this to
be true). So in the vein of all good open source projects, if it's not there
and you want it, jump in and do it!

> It takes time to work out all the issues to provide a stable 
> solution, by which time something newer is most likely out. 
> Changing stuff is a destabalizing factor.  It depends on how 
> "bleeding edge" you want to be.

This is true, and something everyone should know is that the 2.3 release
will have no significant functionality growth, there are some node services
that will be included, but they are being developed mostly by guests, or
externally. The core team is focused only on bug fixing, stability, and
improving tests and documentation. So hopefully this 2.3 release will shake
out the last spasms of the new software.

--Ivan