Re: [Sugar-devel] TamTamMini
Did anyone else notice a difference in how this Activity and Pippy were handled? With pippy the maintainers quickly responded with Cool someone else wants to add value to the project. Here are my notes. Good luck. With TamTam the maintainer responded with My way or the highway. On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 7:39 AM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: Also note that we don't necessarily need to fix the code ourselves, good profiling data is often acted on by lower level libraries maintainers. The default strategy is to pretend it's higher level code fault of course, but issues can't be denied or ignored when proven by numbers and test cases :P On Monday, 18 November 2013, Daniel Narvaez wrote: And we can tackle lower level stuff... It's free and open code too! :) On Monday, 18 November 2013, Gonzalo Odiard wrote: There are some ow level stuff, but we can solve some problems in the activities too. You can see the other thread I started about performance. Also, dsd solved some of the problems related with the dynamic bindings. Gonzalo On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 9:52 AM, Sebastian Silva sebast...@fuentelibre.org wrote: El 17/11/13 12:58, Gonzalo Odiard escribió: I hope we can solve the performance problems then you don't need use a old Sugar version, to avoid all these problems. Well, I don't think it's likely you or me will be able to fix this one. It's lower level than Python and it looks to be by design of the lower level libraries. Note this mainly affects the XO1 which is already considered End Of Life. I think efforts are much more productive in trying to make the GNU+Sugar user experience excellent on Classmates and other netbooks. BTW, we are not the only ones affected. The entire LXDE desktop environment has decided to forego migrating to GTK3 and instead decided to port everything to QT. Here's a quote from the initial release of the QT file manager PCManFM [1]: I, however, need to admit that working with Qt/C++ is much more pleasant and productive than messing with C/GObject/GTK+. Since GTK+ 3 breaks backward compatibility a lot and it becomes more memory hungry and slower, I don’t see much advantage of GTK+ now. GTK+ 2 is lighter, but it’s no longer true for GTK+ 3. Ironically, fixing all of the broken compatibility is even harder than porting to Qt in some cases (PCManFM IMO is one of them). So If someone is starting a whole new project and is thinking about what GUI toolkit to use, personally I might recommend Qt if you’re not targeting Gnome 3. [1] http://blog.lxde.org/?p=990 -- Daniel Narvaez -- Daniel Narvaez ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] TamTamMini
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 4:27 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: David, if you want to make a fair comparison, you need to take in account what was submitted! Hmmm. Flavio and others have been trying to send patches for years. They have been ignored so they fork. At which point upstream complains about how destructive it is when down streams fork. He took a play out of Lionel's book and submitted a completed product to the list for review and analysis of what it takes to maintain a set of activities for a large deployment. Try to submit six copies of the same codebase (instead of a patch) to any other free software project on heart. I bet our reaction will compare *very* favourably in friendliness. Seriously, stop thinking you are being treaten unfairly. You are not. This is about open source best practices. The goal is to highlight the difference a maintainer's attitude has on the tone of a discussion. We appreciate ActivityCentral effort to work upstream, just keep it up and give us a chance. Thank you. We will. In addition, I will continue to identify behaviors and practices which are detrimental to the project and the ecosystem. On 18 November 2013 23:07, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Did anyone else notice a difference in how this Activity and Pippy were handled? With pippy the maintainers quickly responded with Cool someone else wants to add value to the project. Here are my notes. Good luck. With TamTam the maintainer responded with My way or the highway. On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 7:39 AM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: Also note that we don't necessarily need to fix the code ourselves, good profiling data is often acted on by lower level libraries maintainers. The default strategy is to pretend it's higher level code fault of course, but issues can't be denied or ignored when proven by numbers and test cases :P On Monday, 18 November 2013, Daniel Narvaez wrote: And we can tackle lower level stuff... It's free and open code too! :) On Monday, 18 November 2013, Gonzalo Odiard wrote: There are some ow level stuff, but we can solve some problems in the activities too. You can see the other thread I started about performance. Also, dsd solved some of the problems related with the dynamic bindings. Gonzalo On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 9:52 AM, Sebastian Silva sebast...@fuentelibre.org wrote: El 17/11/13 12:58, Gonzalo Odiard escribió: I hope we can solve the performance problems then you don't need use a old Sugar version, to avoid all these problems. Well, I don't think it's likely you or me will be able to fix this one. It's lower level than Python and it looks to be by design of the lower level libraries. Note this mainly affects the XO1 which is already considered End Of Life. I think efforts are much more productive in trying to make the GNU+Sugar user experience excellent on Classmates and other netbooks. BTW, we are not the only ones affected. The entire LXDE desktop environment has decided to forego migrating to GTK3 and instead decided to port everything to QT. Here's a quote from the initial release of the QT file manager PCManFM [1]: I, however, need to admit that working with Qt/C++ is much more pleasant and productive than messing with C/GObject/GTK+. Since GTK+ 3 breaks backward compatibility a lot and it becomes more memory hungry and slower, I don’t see much advantage of GTK+ now. GTK+ 2 is lighter, but it’s no longer true for GTK+ 3. Ironically, fixing all of the broken compatibility is even harder than porting to Qt in some cases (PCManFM IMO is one of them). So If someone is starting a whole new project and is thinking about what GUI toolkit to use, personally I might recommend Qt if you’re not targeting Gnome 3. [1] http://blog.lxde.org/?p=990 -- Daniel Narvaez -- Daniel Narvaez ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- Daniel Narvaez -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] TamTamMini
On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 6:02 PM, Flavio Danesse fdane...@activitycentral.com wrote: I wanted to inform maintainers TamTam : These last few days I've added a little love to TamTamMini. This is an application that has been added Ceibal instruments and small arrangements over the years, but for various reasons, changes were never implemented in the official repository, so that at the launch of each version, I was obliged back to modify the application to meet the specifications of Ceibal. To not have to continue with that methodology, I spent several days to fix, clean and improve implementation. The work done was as follows: Over the past couple of weeks, I have asked some hard questions about the future of Sugar. Lionel responded with an awesome and inspirational web activities prototype. In addition to that type of innovation, I allege that additional deployment feedback is necessary to make sure that what we offer is what deployments need. This work by Flavio exemplifies those needs. TamTamMini separated from other Suite applications, deleting files that were not used. I deleted the images were not used or those that were not necessary. Corrected, I simplified and cleaned up the code. As a result , the application occupies least 5 mb. I ported the application to gtk3 . The update process can take months and even years for large deployments. As a result critical activities must run, have a consistent look and feel, and be validated across both Gtk2 and Gtk3. I built separate versions for xo gtk2 and gtk3 1.0 , x 1.5 , x 1.75 and one for Magalães. Each version contains the corrections necessary for proper operation as both gtk gtk3 for each particular machine. Deployments often run several types of hardware. As a result activities must run, have a consistent look and feel, and be validated across each type of hardware in use by the deployment. The becomes tricky as activities bypass the API provided by Sugar and interact directly with low level libraries. All versions were tested in each of the aforementioned machines and all functioning properly. It only remains to make some very minor repairs on gtk3 versions . I wish that the maintainers of the repository with TamTam saw all this content for the purpose of seeing whether it is possible to unify into a single repository TamTamMini . The challenge becomes what to do when the work like this does not fit the priorities of the activity maintainer. Link: https://github.com/fdanesse/TamTamMini ___ Team mailing list t...@lists.activitycentral.com http://lists.activitycentral.com/listinfo/team -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Proposing backup/restore as feature for 0.102
On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 7:40 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: One of the features we want upstream is Backup/Restore of the Journal. There are already a page for this feature [1] but the currently only is implemented the backup/restore to a connected device (pen drive), and not to/from the school server. I did the port to Sugar 0.100 of the code in dextrose, (patches [2] and [3]) but still think need more work before pushing upstream. Here my comments/questions: * Right now, the access to backup/restore functionality is available in the menu of the connected device (see [4]). May be should be in the Journal button, to allow other destinations in the future, like google drive/dropbox/etc? Or should be as a option in the control panel? (If the control panel is only for configuration this may be not the right place) * The screen look alien [5]. Should be better if we add a toolbar or should be in a modal dialog similar to the control panel/ object chooser? * We need a better icon. * The actual implementation have scripts to backup/restore from the command line. Then the sugar code execute the scripts, and the scripts execute tar. Is needed this indirection or should be better call tar from sugar? This implementation can be tested in our AU images [6] Comments? Perfect. Cleaning up the Dextrose patches and included them in mainline Sugar is an excellent way of adding value: 1. The patches represent feedback from deployments in the form of issues they felt were important enough to pay to fix. 2. The patches are often limited in their scoop due to deployment budget restraints. 3. After a clean up, they will be available to anyone using Sugar. Gonzalo [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Backup_and_Restore [2] https://github.com/godiard/au1b_rpms/blob/master/sugar/0001-Backup-and-Restore-to-a-mounted-device.patch [3] https://github.com/godiard/au1b_rpms/blob/master/sugar/0001-Fix-backup-restore-functionality-SL-4616.patch [4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Backup_usb_menu.png [5] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Backup_before.png [6] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/index.php?title=0.100/Testing ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar Labs Roadmap. [SD 61;79]
On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Yioryos Asprobounitis mavrot...@yahoo.com wrote: Does anyone else want to add their thoughts on: These are all good for now but without the safety of the 2-3 million default users, SL can not just be the upstream. There are some more fundamental questions now that we need to compete in the open market. In a nutshell, whom do we target and which of _their_ needs do we cover better than the competition? 1) Are we targeting (the educational department of) Governments? (ie become OLPC-A) 2) Are we targeting OEMs? (ie find OLPC-A replacements. Are there any?). If yes, which needs of *theirs* do we satisfy better than the competition? 3) Are we targeting existing hardware and if yes, only those already running GNU/Linux? (The vast majority of hardware in and out of schools although it can, does not run GNU/linux let along Fedora, and is very likely to stay that way by just adding Android and iOS) The current html5/js course suggests door no 3, but I have a hard time thinking of something that runs in Windows XP-8.1, OSX 10.6-10.9, major flavors GNU/Linux, iOS and Android 4.x all at the same time and all well! Not even browsers, let along a UX within a browser. This open market course also require some change in the development philosophy. Do we still tell people how things should be done (a la Apple - and GNOME lately) or do we listen to their needs, experience and priorities? If yes which ones? Kids, parents, teachers, local/support techs, funding sources, all of the above (can we)? Do we place Sugar next/parallel to other edu-apps or the Sugar Desktop is mandatory? If the latter, do we integrate (fully sugarize) other apps or stick with our native repertoire? That's a lot of questions with no answers and I can appreciate that these can not be addressed or affect sugar .102 or .104 but they may need to be decided soon for sugar .106 to materialize. I also think that options 1 and 2 need a much stronger political cloud and a political environment of yesterdays to materialize. So let me suggest option #4 that I'm sure will raise some eyebrows (and hopefully not too much more than that :-) Today handhelds have really provided cheap and energy efficient computing and communications, and their penetrance is increasing rapidly around the globe. Thus, build native Sugar for Tablets/Smartphones and *SELL* it for $1.99 through Google Play (and/or AppStore) :-o Obviously, provide the code and a way for rooted (or jail-broken) devices to install it for free, but people/organizations that opt for specific quality locked hardware and the Sugar software stack QA'ed and supported, must contribute (a token really) to its development. If you think of it is like what RHEL is doing and actually much cheaper. Or what OLPC was doing paying developers to develop software for the hardware that was *selling* to users. I can appreciate that this open market approach is a major shift in the culture (but not the reality) of the community from educational software politics and policies to proven educational software quality. But isn't quality what we primarily want from educational software? My experience has been that educational software politics and policies have been been the dominate influence within Sugar Labs. If this is the role that Sugar Labs wants to maintain that is fine, as long as they open the door to other organizations focusing on proven educational software quality. Both approaches have challenges. If Sugar Labs is willing to assume responsibility for quality education software, they will have to adopt a culture and processes which encourage feedback (even negative feedback) and ways to implement solutions to that feedback. Otherwise they are going to have to accept the lose of control if other organizations such as AC provide that service. As the bottom line; the Association is good at sales and marketing, Sugar Labs is good and vision and inspiration, and Activity Central is good at support and implementation. The most likely way to success is to figure out how these three, and any other organizations, can work together. Rather than focus on grudges. Although there is plenty of room for improvement, Sugar has this quality and an installed base to support this claim, and should not be afraid of this course. A strong market presence and user endorsement is actually much better than any PR event or political/academic endorsement in enhancing its appeal and removing the 3rd world/class label from the project. So please consider distributing Sugar .106 through GooglePlay/Appstore! ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Sur] [IAEP] Sugar oversight board meeting
On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:29 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: David - what I meant was, no strategic partnership between the distros. Ubuntu wouldn't pose so many difficulties if M. Shuttleworth/Canonical got behind Sugar for example. In my conversations with Shuttleworth and Redhat they were both pretty upset that they were forced to bid against each other to be part of the OLPC project. Whoever donated more got to be part of the project the other was ignored. That, on top of Ubuntu's screw ups in the education sector ( Canoncial, tried to assume too much control over the community lead Edubuntu project) have left education, and sugar in particular, struggling at Ubuntu. Sean On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 10:46 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 3:07 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: I'm sorry Sebastian, yes I should have been more clear about which Sebastian :-) At the time, Sugar was perceived as being only available on OLPC XOs, so our effort was designed to show that it was available for other platforms. Indeed, our claim has always been that it was hardware-agnostic (on Mac using virtualization), cf. our press releases (sl.o/press). And, SoaS as a marketing concept was meant to be distro-agnostic too (SuSE...), a position fought tooth and nail by the Fedorans by the way. Pre-tablets, when small netbooks sales were exploding, Windows was dominant on PCs but ran poorly or not at all on netbooks and moreover there was an installation barrier for Windows on GNU/Linux netbooks. We were interested in reaching the 92% or so of teachers using Windows and widening Sugar availability on machines with pre-installed GNU/Linux (all 2% or so of them). Microsoft and Intel worked quickly to block GNU/Linux netbooks by pressuring OEMs to build faster machines, then tablets arrived and killed off netbooks. It's unfortunate that Sugar was not fully embraced by the GNU/Linux distros who missed a great opportunity in the education market where Microsoft had and has weaknesses, but that has been a symptom of free software projects struggling with strategic initiatives while concentrating on technical aspects. How does Sugar on Ubuntu (DXU) and Sugar on Tablets (DX experimental) affect this equation for Sugar Labs? Dismal marketing has contributed to dismal desktop market share (Microsoft's well-documented maneuvers played a role too of course). Installation: As Peter has mentioned, SoaS can be used for installation on a target PC, this is documented in the wiki. Concerning translations, language selection was available in at least several versions of SoaS, I remember switching French and US locale and keyboard demoing SoaS at an Educatec-Educatice convention in Paris. I have no doubt that solutions are possible, but do remember that Peter has been continuing SoaS work singlehandedly for some time now. Looking forward, I see a dual challenge for Sugar Labs: supporting the XO installed base (including hopefully keeping XO-4 availability alive), and transitioning to the wild new world of handheld devices. Sean On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 12:21 AM, Sebastian Silva sebast...@fuentelibre.org wrote: El 06/11/13 17:35, Sean DALY escribió: On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: But you have for a long time refused to actually even market SoaS! That's right, at the time SoaS became an official Fedora spin, Mel and Sebastian decided to take over marketing, which included coming up with unmarketable names, linking with Fedora announcements, and opening a Fedora hosted minisite (the home of SoaS), none of which was done with any consultation of the SL marketing team. Please try to include last names, you mean Sebastian Dzallas, original developer of Sugar On A Stick. Now that we're on the topic... the concept Sugar On A Stick has several problems. 1.- It suggests it's the only possible Sugar OS on a USB. 2.- It suggests it's not a serious OS to be installed on a computer. 3.- It's impossible to translate. 4.- It suggests it's not regular GNU/Linux, with availability of the Myriad other GNU/Linux educational tools. Regards, Sebastian Silva R+D SomosAzúcar Sugar Labs Perú @icarito ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar tryout (was Re: sugarlabs.org redesign)
Sugar this way really? On Friday, 8 November 2013, Sean DALY wrote: Not only doable, has been done for some time now [1,2] and is multi-platform ( what I use to demo Sugar on a Mac) The Oracle PUEL license [3] very interestingly permits free redistribution for educational purposes, opening the possibility of a single installer, ideal for our needs. In the past I have suggested approaching Oracle for a marketing partnership under a CSR (corporate social responsibility) banner. Sean 1. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VirtualBox 2. https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Creation_Kit/VirtualBox 2. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox_PUEL On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: At least the virtualbox looks doable and a good way to show Sugar. Gonzalo On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 9:44 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, 7 November 2013, Sean DALY wrote: The larger problem is the absence of a marketing strategy, we need to know where we are going to communicate effectively. In particular, we need to choose and implement how to offer Sugar tryout to teachers and journalists. I can think of a couple of approaches * Get Sugar running well on the CuBox-i. Find budget to buy a few of those to distribute to chosen journalist and teachers. Try to partner with SolidRun to offer Sugar as an out-of-the-box installation option. * Make it easy to run Sugar inside VirtualBox on Windows and OS X. Without having investigated too deeply it seems that a two step process would be both realistically implementable and easy enough for the user 1 Install virtualbox 2 Install a Sugar application (which would take care of setting up the appliance). Thoughts? Other ideas? If we can agree on one or two concrete, realistic approaches, I think we can at least attempt to get them done for 3.102. -- Daniel Narvaez ___ Marketing mailing list market...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing -- Daniel Narvaez -- Daniel Narvaez ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] different perspectives
On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 1:56 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: The highest rate of progress happens when the parties focus on getting ahead of the other guys rather then when they focus on holding others back. Progress tends to stop when one party gets so far ahead that it is not worth it for others to compete. I don't disagree, but I would qualify that: The highest rate of progress happens when the parties focus on getting ahead of the other guys by changing the game. This is why I maintain that GNU/Linux distros considering each other as competitors is pointless at the end of the day when 92% or so of the desktop/laptop market is running MS Windows. Agreed. That is one of the reasons Google is maintaining such a tight hold on Android. They are trying to maintain the critical mass for the OS by preventing fragmentation. The downside becomes the somewhat extreme, by free software standards, they are using to maintain control of the project. Sean -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Role of Sugar Labs in the ecosystem.
In conjunction the with Sugar Roadmap thread I would like to bring up another rather strategic issue. Namely, what role does Sugar Labs want to play in the ecosystem. The question become important because at this point Sugar Labs is the closest thing the ecosystem has to a gravitational center. These hand-wavy strategy questions are real questions which users and deployers are going to ask before they commit to Sugar. Is Sugar Labs 'just a free software project' or is it the center and leaders of a global educational project? or somewhere in between? Either is fine as long as the behavior is predictable and consistent. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Role of Sugar Labs in the ecosystem.
Sorry, I forgot about that list. On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 5:55 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: IAEP! :) On 9 November 2013 00:45, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: In conjunction the with Sugar Roadmap thread I would like to bring up another rather strategic issue. Namely, what role does Sugar Labs want to play in the ecosystem. The question become important because at this point Sugar Labs is the closest thing the ecosystem has to a gravitational center. These hand-wavy strategy questions are real questions which users and deployers are going to ask before they commit to Sugar. Is Sugar Labs 'just a free software project' or is it the center and leaders of a global educational project? or somewhere in between? Either is fine as long as the behavior is predictable and consistent. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Daniel Narvaez -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar Labs Roadmap.
Does anyone else want to add their thoughts on: 1. What is the future availability of XO hardware? What are the alternatives? What hardware choices are deployments going to make for their next and future rounds of purchasing. 2. How effectively does Sugar run on the available hardware options? What will it take to bring Sugar up to a deployment level quality on this hardware? 3. What resources are required to make this happen? Again, this might seem hand-wavy. An shared understanding of where the project going is important for creating a sense of shared value. It also helps us as individuals chose our work so that it has the most impact on the ecosystem and the project. On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 6:34 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 7:19 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 8 November 2013 13:10, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: Classmate and Classmate variants are already quick wide spread in some deployments, e.g., Argentina I wonder if we should try to get some classmates in the hands of Sugar Labs community members. It seems like the most solid hardware option we have for deployments at the moment. I'll look into it. * Chromebook At least one deployment is looking at this option. Looking forward to know how this goes :) Another couple more for community evaluation (evaluation, testing, marketing) * Linux compatible ARM boards * Virtualbox SoaS is our current offering for Virtualbox (As you pointed out in a previous thread, it is a two-step process to install. In my experience, that is 1 too many for our audience. Something we may be able to address by approaching some of the VM suppliers.) We are crossing threads here but... I think it would be great to have a single installer but (without having tried it!) the current installation process doesn't seem terribly bad. I feel that documenting it better and turning it into the first thing you see when you click downloads could go a long way. - RD resources I feel balance with addressing existing deployments needs is not a question Sugar Labs can or should answer. We should encourage and support both, it's up to companies and volunteers involved to see how much of either they could or should be doing. +1 That said, the discipline you have imparted on us regarding unit tests is a step that the community can take. Maybe one of our priorities should be to dust off some basic automatic testing for activities as well. OLPC used to have such a system in place. Of course I'm all for more unit tests :) The buildbot is already trying to start and close activities on every build but it would be great if people wrote more comprehensive unit and UI tests, similarly to what we are doing in the shell. Get them to run into sugar-build/buildbot would be trivial... Maybe we can work on an example for an activity and then propagate (via GCI). We are not a company, we have no resources to allocate. But there are lots of concrete things we can do to encourage people to allocate them. I'm really glad to see that Activity Central figured out how to devote resources to RD. I hope you will be able to keep it up and more people will follow that example. We can leverage initiatives like Google Code. We can try crowd funding. We can apply for grants, as we have been doing sometimes successfully. We can keep lowering the barriers for volunteers, we have been making great progress on that. We can finally solve the un-marketability issue, attracting attention and energies and hence hopefully contributions. Google Code In starts on Nov. 18. But we can keep adding tasks over the course of the contest. Please don't be shy about suggesting tasks. And we could also use a few more mentors. I don't think I'm able to commit to be an official mentor but, as usual, I'll be answering as many questions as possible in irc/mailing lists when I am around. Sort of thinking to puth GConf - GSettings on the list... And Wayland support but that's probably too complex for GCI. GConf to GSettings is definitely GCI caliber introductory task worthy. -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Sur] [IAEP] Sugar oversight board meeting
On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 3:07 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: I'm sorry Sebastian, yes I should have been more clear about which Sebastian :-) At the time, Sugar was perceived as being only available on OLPC XOs, so our effort was designed to show that it was available for other platforms. Indeed, our claim has always been that it was hardware-agnostic (on Mac using virtualization), cf. our press releases (sl.o/press). And, SoaS as a marketing concept was meant to be distro-agnostic too (SuSE...), a position fought tooth and nail by the Fedorans by the way. Pre-tablets, when small netbooks sales were exploding, Windows was dominant on PCs but ran poorly or not at all on netbooks and moreover there was an installation barrier for Windows on GNU/Linux netbooks. We were interested in reaching the 92% or so of teachers using Windows and widening Sugar availability on machines with pre-installed GNU/Linux (all 2% or so of them). Microsoft and Intel worked quickly to block GNU/Linux netbooks by pressuring OEMs to build faster machines, then tablets arrived and killed off netbooks. It's unfortunate that Sugar was not fully embraced by the GNU/Linux distros who missed a great opportunity in the education market where Microsoft had and has weaknesses, but that has been a symptom of free software projects struggling with strategic initiatives while concentrating on technical aspects. How does Sugar on Ubuntu (DXU) and Sugar on Tablets (DX experimental) affect this equation for Sugar Labs? Dismal marketing has contributed to dismal desktop market share (Microsoft's well-documented maneuvers played a role too of course). Installation: As Peter has mentioned, SoaS can be used for installation on a target PC, this is documented in the wiki. Concerning translations, language selection was available in at least several versions of SoaS, I remember switching French and US locale and keyboard demoing SoaS at an Educatec-Educatice convention in Paris. I have no doubt that solutions are possible, but do remember that Peter has been continuing SoaS work singlehandedly for some time now. Looking forward, I see a dual challenge for Sugar Labs: supporting the XO installed base (including hopefully keeping XO-4 availability alive), and transitioning to the wild new world of handheld devices. Sean On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 12:21 AM, Sebastian Silva sebast...@fuentelibre.org wrote: El 06/11/13 17:35, Sean DALY escribió: On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: But you have for a long time refused to actually even market SoaS! That's right, at the time SoaS became an official Fedora spin, Mel and Sebastian decided to take over marketing, which included coming up with unmarketable names, linking with Fedora announcements, and opening a Fedora hosted minisite (the home of SoaS), none of which was done with any consultation of the SL marketing team. Please try to include last names, you mean Sebastian Dzallas, original developer of Sugar On A Stick. Now that we're on the topic... the concept Sugar On A Stick has several problems. 1.- It suggests it's the only possible Sugar OS on a USB. 2.- It suggests it's not a serious OS to be installed on a computer. 3.- It's impossible to translate. 4.- It suggests it's not regular GNU/Linux, with availability of the Myriad other GNU/Linux educational tools. Regards, Sebastian Silva R+D SomosAzúcar Sugar Labs Perú @icarito ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Marketing] RFC: Make Sugar 0.102 = Sugar 1.0[ Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 61, Issue 43]
In hind sight... The gtk2 - gtk3 would have benefited from a major version change. At the time, I didn't realized it. From a deployment perspective the shift represented a major change. In addition to the base software, all of the necessary activities needed to be migrated, QAed, and verified if the deployment wanted a consistent user experience across all activities. From a deployment perspective, it might be valuable to denote the next major API change/upgrade (web activities) with a major version bump to clearly indicate to users and deployers that web actives are complete in version X. FWIW, this is a departure, learned the hard way, from my preference for time base number as used by Ubuntu. On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: thanks for that Gonzalo the key version number criteria for marketing is not that it's a formal system, it's to simplify a story for people who have little or more likely no idea what Sugar is. The story we are developing is: we are meeting the challenge of handheld devices while supporting our 3 million Learners. This story will be well-served by a v2 or v3 number, but I'm afraid linking the year will box us into a timeframe when what we need (marketing standpoint again) is a version number on a flexible timetable according to circumstances. F/LOSS projects are not a marketing reference for me, with very few exceptions they are not good at it at all. My references are the iPod, Nespresso, Amazon, Coca-Cola, etc. Sean On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 10:47 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: Sean, Usually, we are not doing big changes, but incremental changes. We are closer to the reality of the linux kernel, where the change to 3.0 was not related to changes itself, but to the numbers where not comfortable, and they are planning release version 4.0 by the same reason in one year. What you think about using years as versions (2013.1 2013.2 or 13.1, 13.2) as a way to try incentive to the deployments and the final users to be updated? Gonzalo On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 6:37 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: cc'ing marketing for... a marketing issue Nope, the GTK3 change just passed under the radar. As stated previously I lobbied for a v1 six years ago which is why we are ready for a v2. Or even a v3. For building a PR story I can work with v2 or v3, just not v1. The issue with 2.2, 2.4 is that from a marketing perspective we get boxed into a major number step timeframe irrespective of marketing needs. A major number change should ideally happen when it's ready, or when we need to communicate a major shift. I still think associating the existing numbering behind a major number (e.g. 2.102) keeps continuity. PR will communicate the major number, probably with a name. And not an unmarketable obscure name, either. Sean Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 8:36 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: Hmm I suppose the 1.x - 2.x switch would have not made sense to marketing because there wasn't major user visible changes? On Thursday, 7 November 2013, Yioryos Asprobounitis wrote: For sugar developers their is certainly a continuation in development and the current numbering makes a lot of sense. However, looking from outside 0.102 should be Sugar 3.x where 1.x is the original, 2.x is the Gtk3/introspection move and now the html5/jc (online/ultrabook/tablet) version. If you actually consider 0.100 as 3.0 then it can go 3.2, 3.4 etc to keep up with current numbering. Should make marketing happy with minimal disruption. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Daniel Narvaez ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Marketing mailing list market...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Server-devel] [XSCE] Re: XSCE weekly voice call, 2PM NYC Time Thursday
A quick note CCed to Sugar-devel An interesting thing the XS community is doing is holding irc meetings on Tuesday and voice meetings on Thursdays. There are two mailing lists, a public list and and internal list. Different people prefer different styles of communication. On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Adam Holt h...@laptop.org wrote: Missed ya Jon: Minutes were cleaned up @ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o6QtzLb6e58YKWqMf_junux2XyBRLFm31un8YLcYslg but let us know what's missing! On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 1:08 PM, Jon Nettleton jon.nettle...@gmail.com wrote: Unfortunately I can't make it tonight guys. I will review the minutes/call notes and make it to the next one. If there are questions on the call that you need my input on try IRC. I will kind of be online but can't be on a voice call as I will be on another one. -Jon On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 3:28 PM, Adam Holt h...@unleashkids.org wrote: On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 9:22 AM, Adam Holt h...@laptop.org wrote: Some of us will join from Malaysia next week (1AM) but obviously some will not ;) Correction: 3AM Malaysia Time! In any case, 2PM NYC Time every Thursday. Agenda/Minutes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o6QtzLb6e58YKWqMf_junux2XyBRLFm31un8YLcYslg George is back and 0.5 is coming down to the wire! Thanks again for sending yr Skype username or phone number in advance if you can join in just under 5 hrs from now (2PM NYC Time). -- Unsung Heroes of OLPC, interviewed live @ http://unleashkids.org ! ___ Server-devel mailing list server-de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel -- Unsung Heroes of OLPC, interviewed live @ http://unleashkids.org ! ___ Server-devel mailing list server-de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Tech roadmap
On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: Re library versions, that reminds of a point I should have put in my list... I think now that the gobject introspection migration is over upstream can become more conservative about library versions. That should help both distributors and developers. We are already going in that direction really. If we add Webkit1 compatibility as discussed, I think 0.102 might have pretty much the same dependencies of 0.98. The only exception is libxkb if I remember correctly, for which introspection was really broken. In addition to dependencies there can be issues with versions of dependencies. Within the next couple of week we should see these fixes flow upstream. So we can start talking about concrete issues and examples rather than abstract notions. I think that will help clarify the discussion. AC's challenge was to quietly get a proof of concept in place which adds value to deployments before suggesting making changes to upstream. Now, AC has to clean up and abstract the proof of concept work to prepare it for acceptance upstream. On Thursday, 7 November 2013, David Farning wrote: I agree :) Right now, we are sitting back and seeing what roll OLPC-Australia is going to play in the ecosystem. The One Education distribution out of Australia is a combination of Dextrose, Sugar .100 and some custom patches. My semi-informed guess is that Walter and Rangan ( https://www.laptop.org.au/about ) are going to position One Education as the successor to OLPC-OS. I hope that we will learn more at about their plans at basecamp. ( http://olpcbasecamp.blogspot.com/ ) This would take care or the leading edge on Fedora. On the Ubuntu side we have a bit of a challenge balancing bleeding edge and stability. Sugar and Fedora tend to run a bit ahead of Debian and Ubuntu in library versions. It take a significant amount of effort to backport the necessary libraries to Ubuntu LTS. For this release we agreed that the proper balance of innovation and stability was Sugar .98 on Ubuntu 12.04. The next decision point will be which version of Sugar to use for the 14.04 release due in the second quarter of 2014. On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: Cool stuff. As for Fedora it would be great to have builds with the latest sugar (stable and unstable) releases. I'm not saying to ship those to deployments of course, but they would help upstream development, marketing and testing... And they would help AC to make the transition to the next sugar release smoother. On 7 November 2013 02:05, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Please see the link at the bottom left of http://dextrose.ac/platform/ for the Sugar on Ubuntu images which Activity Central and Plan Ceibal are jointly developing. For stability it is based on Ubuntu 12.04 and Sugar .98. The testing is done on classmate to meet Plan Ceibal's specifications. I should work equally well on any machine that boots Ubuntu. It is currently is small scale testing by a couple hundred teachers. When the image meets Ceibal's quality standards the pilot will scale to approximately 10,000 units for wider testing. For more information, I have CC Anish Mangal, the project owner (agile speak) and Ruben Rodriguez the lead developer. Ruben has the strongest back ground on the technical issues involved in the port. Anish has the deepest understanding of timelines and objectives. On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 6 November 2013 16:20, Manuel Quiñones ma...@laptop.org wrote: Classmates are basically just x86 netbooks, I've not tried it as I don't have HW but I don't see any reason they shouldn't work OOTB. Yep. Sugar is running in classmates out of the box. In Uruguay for example. You mean people are using them in Uruguay deployments? Which distro? ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- Daniel Narvaez -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- Daniel Narvaez -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Sugar Labs Roadmap.
Daniel recently started a related thread called Tech Roadmap and Sean started a marketing thread related to naming. To reduce confusion I thought that it might be valuable to take a step back and look at an overall Sugar Labs Roadmap. After reviewing the various threads over the last couple of days it seemed that one of the sources of communication has been the 'level' of communication. IE Ecosystem strategy, deployment/organizational strategy, or technical implementation. This has resulted in people, including me, talking past each other rather than to each other. As the ecosystem adopts to the reduced roll of the Association, at least on the laptop side of the project, this might be a good time to re-evaluate the role of Sugar Labs and it's relationships. The three immediate questions appear to be: 1. What is the future availability of XO hardware? What are the alternatives? What hardware choices are deployments going to make for their next and future rounds of purchasing. 2. How effectively does Sugar run on the available hardware options? What will it take to bring Sugar up to a deployment level quality on this hardware? 3. What resources are required to make this happen? In general there seem to be three branches of this decision tree. XOs, commodity laptops and tablets. After considering the hardware issue, a second round of questions is how do we get there? This implies a balance between supporting existing deployments and the RD necessary to make the next step possible. This balance question implies gathering knowledge of existing deployments and their needs. This level of strategy might seem rather hand-wavy or business like :( But, it is helpful for everyone to have an understanding of were the project is going, how we are planning on getting there, and how one's own interest and abilities can add value. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] different perspectives
On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Dear Community, As I was listening to the interviews of some of the OLPC SF Summit attendees, I was amazed at the richness of diversity in perspectives. In spite of being a part of this community since July 2007, and trying to keep up with all that is OLPC and Sugar, these interviews threw me off a bit. The videos are uploading as I write this. They'll be available at https://www.youtube.com/user/olpcsf/videos soon. Bill Stelzer, who usually interviews and runs the camera asks people a handful of questions. So, here's a little community exercise. Why not ask you all the same? 1) What brought you into the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? After leaving the military, I was searching for something meaningful to do with my life. Over the years, I have become frustrated the the ability for individuals and groups to control others, often for their own benefit, by restricting their access to education and communication. Precursors to the Arab Spring emerged as dissidents used technologies such as cell phones, texting, and email to bypass normal communication restrictions in their region. This brought me to the conclusion that the intersection of rapidly falling hardware prices, rapidly increasing availability of connectivity, and open source software had the potential to be as culturally disruptive as the printing press was in the 1400 and 1500. Somewhere across the line I came across the OLPC project. While the focus of the project was different then my personal goals, the methods, and likely the effects, of OLPC plus Sugar seemed remarkably similar to my personal goals. 2) What keeps you going in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? While frustrating, the project is nudging the world in the right direction. 3) What are the challenges you face in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? The major challenge ( albeit, on a rather abstract level ) is how the ecosystem deals with the issues of Control, Credit, and Money. 4) What would you change/do differently so OLPC and/or Sugar project(s) could do better? Identify and attempt to fix bottlenecks in the ecosystem which limit the effectiveness of deployments: 1. Create a deployment sponsored distribution, Dextrose, to close the feedback loop between developers and deployment. The Dextrose sustainability model ensures that loop is closed. Fixes and features which go into dextrose are valuable enough that some deployment somewhere is willing to pay for it. 1a. Establish the company-community arms race. While a bit dated there is an excellent talk at https://fossbazaar.org/content/bdale-garbee-collaborating-successfully-large-corporations/ about company and community relationship. Bdale uses the interesting analogy of the arms race to describe the relationship between companies and communities in Open Source development. The Company is constantly trying to add features and fixes which provide them competitive advantage in the market place. The Community is constantly innovating and unwinding the companies competitive advantage and making it available to the community. The highest rate of progress happens when the parties focus on getting ahead of the other guys rather then when they focus on holding others back. Progress tends to stop when one party gets so far ahead that it is not worth it for others to compete. 2. Establish a effective community-company project, XSCE, to prove that there is nothing inherent in the OLPC/Sugar space which prevents effective community-relationships. Over the last year, we have been following two core principles to build a effective school server community. Welcome people with overlapping but non-identical goals. Build on one another's strength while minimizing the effects of our own weakness. 3. Establish a 'facilitators network' to improve communication between parents, teachers, deployers, and developers. ( Work in Progress) 4. Build on lessons learned in 1,2, and 3 to establish a mutually beneficial relationship between AC and Sugar Labs. Please note, these are intentionally very specific area in which I plan on investing my time and money:) Reply-all in your answers. cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Tech roadmap
Please see the link at the bottom left of http://dextrose.ac/platform/ for the Sugar on Ubuntu images which Activity Central and Plan Ceibal are jointly developing. For stability it is based on Ubuntu 12.04 and Sugar .98. The testing is done on classmate to meet Plan Ceibal's specifications. I should work equally well on any machine that boots Ubuntu. It is currently is small scale testing by a couple hundred teachers. When the image meets Ceibal's quality standards the pilot will scale to approximately 10,000 units for wider testing. For more information, I have CC Anish Mangal, the project owner (agile speak) and Ruben Rodriguez the lead developer. Ruben has the strongest back ground on the technical issues involved in the port. Anish has the deepest understanding of timelines and objectives. On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 6 November 2013 16:20, Manuel Quiñones ma...@laptop.org wrote: Classmates are basically just x86 netbooks, I've not tried it as I don't have HW but I don't see any reason they shouldn't work OOTB. Yep. Sugar is running in classmates out of the box. In Uruguay for example. You mean people are using them in Uruguay deployments? Which distro? ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Tech roadmap
I agree :) Right now, we are sitting back and seeing what roll OLPC-Australia is going to play in the ecosystem. The One Education distribution out of Australia is a combination of Dextrose, Sugar .100 and some custom patches. My semi-informed guess is that Walter and Rangan ( https://www.laptop.org.au/about ) are going to position One Education as the successor to OLPC-OS. I hope that we will learn more at about their plans at basecamp. ( http://olpcbasecamp.blogspot.com/ ) This would take care or the leading edge on Fedora. On the Ubuntu side we have a bit of a challenge balancing bleeding edge and stability. Sugar and Fedora tend to run a bit ahead of Debian and Ubuntu in library versions. It take a significant amount of effort to backport the necessary libraries to Ubuntu LTS. For this release we agreed that the proper balance of innovation and stability was Sugar .98 on Ubuntu 12.04. The next decision point will be which version of Sugar to use for the 14.04 release due in the second quarter of 2014. On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: Cool stuff. As for Fedora it would be great to have builds with the latest sugar (stable and unstable) releases. I'm not saying to ship those to deployments of course, but they would help upstream development, marketing and testing... And they would help AC to make the transition to the next sugar release smoother. On 7 November 2013 02:05, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Please see the link at the bottom left of http://dextrose.ac/platform/ for the Sugar on Ubuntu images which Activity Central and Plan Ceibal are jointly developing. For stability it is based on Ubuntu 12.04 and Sugar .98. The testing is done on classmate to meet Plan Ceibal's specifications. I should work equally well on any machine that boots Ubuntu. It is currently is small scale testing by a couple hundred teachers. When the image meets Ceibal's quality standards the pilot will scale to approximately 10,000 units for wider testing. For more information, I have CC Anish Mangal, the project owner (agile speak) and Ruben Rodriguez the lead developer. Ruben has the strongest back ground on the technical issues involved in the port. Anish has the deepest understanding of timelines and objectives. On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 6 November 2013 16:20, Manuel Quiñones ma...@laptop.org wrote: Classmates are basically just x86 netbooks, I've not tried it as I don't have HW but I don't see any reason they shouldn't work OOTB. Yep. Sugar is running in classmates out of the box. In Uruguay for example. You mean people are using them in Uruguay deployments? Which distro? ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- Daniel Narvaez -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Have we achieved consensus among activite Sugar developers?
On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 4:59 PM, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote: On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 10:28:35AM -0500, David Farning wrote: Have we achieved general consensus that the three phase approach I proposed earlier this week has the potential for establishing a mutually beneficial relationship while progressively rebuilding trust on both sides? I got lost in the discussion again; I couldn't see how your three phase approach answered Walter's question about your perception that Sugar Labs is not acting transparently. ;-) The big idea is that open sources projects thrive when they create conditions and cultures where people with overlapping yet non-identical goals can come together collaborate around a common goal. Sugar Labs has found itself in a position where there is a high degree of conformity. This tends to create an echo chamber where similar opinions are respected and encouraged. That can be effective at building passion and energy, but it tends to crowd out dissenting opinions and marginalize the people who hold those opinions. These people can be the most productive members of the community in their particular areas of interest. The transparency challenge is that many potentially valuable members leave in frustration when their voices are not heard. Conversations escalate from civil to uncivil. This reduces the rate of development, quality of support, and potentially the future viability Sugar. Attempting to prove that via examples would create personal feuds which are unproductive at all levels. Instead, I would ask you to talk to people in the ecosystem, outside of the current core sugar developers, and gather feedback about what they think works and doesn't work. Instead, I would like the opportunity to prove the premise by showing the theory in action. My assumption is that if that we can work together on a series of tasks which require increasing amounts of acceptance for divergent opinions, we can identify and reduce the sources of the underlying tension. 1. Phase one requires that we work together on a relatively straight forward project. HTML5+JS is the current focus of Sugar Labs. While it is not AC's primary focus, we consider it a key strategic project. 2. Phase two will be a bit more complicated as we ask various developer to publicly agree on various core priorities for the next release. This related directly to manq's post about being focused on individual priorities. Without an understanding of everyone's priorities and the value they bring to the project, it can be easy to feel ignored, or even attacked, when one's own priorities are ignored. 3. Phase three -- Dig into the balance between stable and leading edge. Historically, this has been a touchy subject because of the high degree of interest in innovation by key Sugar Labs members. However, large deployments consider stability and LTS very important. My assumption is that if Sugar Labs and Activity Central can set an example for working together, other marginalized parties with rejoin the project. David Regarding your need to rebuild trust on both sides; perhaps a quantitative approach; you could list the areas and extents in which Sugar Labs trusts Activity Central and Activity Central trusts Sugar Labs now. e.g. feature discussion, design review, patch review, go no-go release decisions, support for released code. Gain general agreement. Then do a diff against past and future. But this begins to sound like a developers' social contract, and not specific to Activity Central. My gut feel is that Sugar Labs treats all technical contributions fairly, regardless of funding source, and that promising funding gains no advantage except better phrasing of the responses; 'cause the funding bias is better understood to be present. However, looking carefully at your three phase approach on 29th October: 1. you are funding work; fine by me, thanks, expect some responses to these developers to be coloured by the awareness of funding, 2. you want more discussion about features and whether features as built are ready for release; fine by me, this is no material change to current process, 3. you speculate that there is a conflict between supporting existing deployments and developing the next releases; this doesn't fit with me, the two workloads are very different vectors in the phase space of possible work, and Sugar Labs primarily operates on only one of the vectors, solving support problems in the next release. -- Disclosure statement: the author provides consulting to OLPCA, and OLPCA does benefit from Sugar Labs releases. The author receives no direct funding from Sugar Labs or any deployment. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 3:59 PM, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote: p.s. it is good that you are being transparent with your decisions, because that gives you a chance to have them publically reviewed. ;-) On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 12:04:11PM -0500, David Farning wrote: Thanks for the update. Currently, AC does not have the credibility to participate in the design process. To not participate in the design process is entirely your decision, but, if you'll accept my advice, your reasoning for the decision is flawed! Credibility is not what you think it is. In this context credibility is a combination of trustworthiness and expertise... which is individually earned from one's peers. At this point I don't expect that either I nor any of the developers from Activity have established credibility within Sugar Labs. Expertise is pretty straight forward, does the individual have a history of making good decisions about the subject at hand? Trustworthiness is also pretty straight forward: 1. Does the individual have a track record of, saying what they will do and then doing what they said they would do? 2. Is the individual able to fairly balance their own interests, the interests of the project, and the interests of the ecosystem? 3. Is the individual able to bring out the best in themselves and other around them though effective work and communication? Credibility take time and effort to earn. For technical design and feature specification in the Sugar Labs community, organisational credibility is not required. It is the technical input that is valuable. Sugar Labs has received valuable input from a range of credibilities, including bright young children, teachers of children, and crusty old engineers like me. And if you do think organisational credibility is required, that begs the question of why ... is it that you expect your technical input to be swayed by your credibility? Surely not. Don't hold the community to ransom for your technical input, just give it, give it early, and give it often. Let's give it 2-3 months for AC's RD team learning how to work effectively with the HTML5+JS team at SL. Use this phase of the process as an opportunity for you and your people to practice communicating with other developers in the community; and measure the effort in the design process, not the achievements. In the first couple of weeks, I expect that this will mostly involve creating web activities to build familiarity the the technologies and API's. The return value to Sugar Labs will be testing and feedback about the current web activities framework. I'm worried that it is quite late in the life of the web activities framework for this feedback, but better late than never. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
Thanks for the update. Currently, AC does not have the credibility to participate in the design process. Let's give it 2-3 months for AC's RD team learning how to work effectively with the HTML5+JS team at SL. In the first couple of weeks, I expect that this will mostly involve creating web activities to build familiarity the the technologies and API's. The return value to Sugar Labs will be testing and feedback about the current web activities framework. On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 October 2013 20:29, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Phase two -- Let's look at lessons learned from other projects. We can focus on the road map and product specification. From my experience, these two piece can provide an anchor for the rest of the project: 1. The act of sitting down and hashing out the roadmap and project specification causes everyone to sit back and assess their individual priorities and goals and how they fit into the project as a whole. 2. The act of deciding which items are above the line and which are below the line, which are targeted for this release and which are pushed to a future release, help find the balance between what is possible some day and what is probable in X months of work with existing resources. 3. Sitting back and preparing for a release forces us to asses what is good enough for release what is not. It is a good feedback loop. 4. Finally, after a successful release everyone can sit back bask is the satisfaction that maybe we didn't save the world... but we make enough progress that it is worth getting up again tomorrow and doing it all again. Hi David, I just started a thread about 0.102 focus and features. If you want to get involved defining the upstream roadmap there is your chance! For 0.100 we kept that very very simple, a short list of new features basically. But if you want to contribute with a product specification I think that would be awesome. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Have we achieved consensus among activite Sugar developers?
Have we achieved general consensus that the three phase approach I proposed earlier this week has the potential for establishing a mutually beneficial relationship while progressively rebuilding trust on both sides? I will be happy to answer any questions, but I would like to get to work. Talk is little more than a distraction without the accompanying code and credibility:( -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. The three things I am going to takeway from the the thread are: 1. Jame's point about my position about not representing the median. Due to my history and role in the ecosystem, I have upset some apple-carts :( 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. 3. Finally, and most importantly, Daniel's point about getting back to the business of improving Sugar. My proposal is that Activity Central make the next step of funding two developers to work on HTML5 and JS. If we can find a mutually beneficial relationship around this, we can see how we can expand the relationship in the future. Seem reasonable? Proposals aside (of course more eyes and hands would be appreciated) there is still the underlying issue of mistrust that you have raised. I think it is important that we clear the air and I think it is not unreasonable to ask you to be specific about your perceptions that somehow Sugar Labs is not acting in a transparent manner. Agreed, let's do it step wise: Phase one -- Code and Roger will will start on the HTML5 + JS work with Daniel and Manq. Daniel has struck me as 'fair but firm.' On Activity Central's side, we are probably not going to incorporate that work in customer facing products for 6-9 months. Thus, it can be a trial of AC supporting upstream on innovative work without subjecting upstream the to changing desires of customers. Phase two -- Let's look at lessons learned from other projects. We can focus on the road map and product specification. From my experience, these two piece can provide an anchor for the rest of the project: 1. The act of sitting down and hashing out the roadmap and project specification causes everyone to sit back and assess their individual priorities and goals and how they fit into the project as a whole. 2. The act of deciding which items are above the line and which are below the line, which are targeted for this release and which are pushed to a future release, help find the balance between what is possible some day and what is probable in X months of work with existing resources. 3. Sitting back and preparing for a release forces us to asses what is good enough for release what is not. It is a good feedback loop. 4. Finally, after a successful release everyone can sit back bask is the satisfaction that maybe we didn't save the world... but we make enough progress that it is worth getting up again tomorrow and doing it all again. Phase three -- Let's look at some mechanism for balancing the need to push the project forward through innovation and support existing deployments by providing stability. David -walter On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 October 2013 01:14, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. The patch queue is currently empty. In the last six months only one patchset was rejected. It was by Activity Central and it was rejected by me (not an OLPC employee) for purely technical reasons. The proof being that the same patchset landed after being cleaned up and resubmitted properly by another Activity Central developer. More in general, no single developer is in charge of patch reviewing, OLPC couldn't keep code out of the tree for non-technical reason even if they wanted to. More specifically the ability to approve patches was offered to one Activity Central developer, which never used it. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to test datastore was met with silence. Mailing list posts going unanswered isn't really uncommon in free software projects. But most of the time it just means that no one knows the answer or everyone is too busy. Only me and Manuel are usually answering about HTML5. I have not answered because... gmail put those messages in my spam folder, sigh! Most likely the same happened to Manuel or he has been busy. (I need to take some sleep now but I'll try to answer asap
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: About phase two: What is wrong with our actual Feature process? There is nothing wrong with the feature process. The project specification ( please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Community_Edition/0.4/Project_Specifications ) is supplemental to the feature process. It the case of Sugar I would expect that features end of taking the place of services. The goal is to create a single point of reference where people with different backgrounds, interests, and levels of participation can see how they fit into the big picture. About topics you are not talking, I would like AC spend some time trying to push features upstream. That was almost not done in the last year, and I am working on that right now, but would be good some help from your part. I was hoping to sit on this for a while. Internally we are restructuring our Dextrose team around providing long term support across multiple platforms. Short term this means building our team. Mid term this means aligning AC's git repo as branches on the Sugar Labs github repo. Long term the goal is that AC will actively participate in maintaining a long term release of upstream Sugar. My thinking was that as organizations we can build trust (on both side) by working on the easier tasks of 1 and 2. In the meantime AC's internal Dextrose team can figure out enough of a strategy so that when we present something to the community we are not talking about half baked ideas and showing half baked code Cause lets be honest. If after this thread AC shows up with crap, you and any other Sugar Labs hacker will kick AC out on our asses, and we would deserve it. I am happy to revisit this, but I would like to clarify our organizational priorities and why we chose them. Gonzalo On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 4:29 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. The three things I am going to takeway from the the thread are: 1. Jame's point about my position about not representing the median. Due to my history and role in the ecosystem, I have upset some apple-carts :( 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. 3. Finally, and most importantly, Daniel's point about getting back to the business of improving Sugar. My proposal is that Activity Central make the next step of funding two developers to work on HTML5 and JS. If we can find a mutually beneficial relationship around this, we can see how we can expand the relationship in the future. Seem reasonable? Proposals aside (of course more eyes and hands would be appreciated) there is still the underlying issue of mistrust that you have raised. I think it is important that we clear the air and I think it is not unreasonable to ask you to be specific about your perceptions that somehow Sugar Labs is not acting in a transparent manner. Agreed, let's do it step wise: Phase one -- Code and Roger will will start on the HTML5 + JS work with Daniel and Manq. Daniel has struck me as 'fair but firm.' On Activity Central's side, we are probably not going to incorporate that work in customer facing products for 6-9 months. Thus, it can be a trial of AC supporting upstream on innovative work without subjecting upstream the to changing desires of customers. Phase two -- Let's look at lessons learned from other projects. We can focus on the road map and product specification. From my experience, these two piece can provide an anchor for the rest of the project: 1. The act of sitting down and hashing out the roadmap and project specification causes everyone to sit back and assess their individual priorities and goals and how they fit into the project as a whole. 2. The act of deciding which items are above the line and which are below the line, which are targeted for this release and which are pushed to a future release, help find the balance between what is possible some day and what is probable in X months of work with existing resources. 3. Sitting back and preparing for a release forces us to asses what is good enough for release what is not. It is a good feedback loop. 4. Finally, after a successful release everyone can sit back bask is the satisfaction that maybe we didn't save the world... but we make enough progress that it is worth getting up again tomorrow and doing it all again. Phase three -- Let's look at some mechanism for balancing the need to push the project forward through innovation and support existing deployments by providing stability. David -walter On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7
Re: [Sugar-devel] Principles for ethical technology use
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 5:35 PM, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote: Before sending a mail, writing code, editing a Wiki page, releasing an activity, or pressing enter on IRC; quote 1. [...] would it be alright if everyone did it? 2. Is this going to harm or dehumanise anyone, even people I don’t know and will never meet? 3. Do I have the informed consent of those who will be affected? If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, then it is arguably unethical to do it. /quote Quote is from the middle of an article by a lecturer in applied ethics socio-technical studies: http://theconversation.com/on-best-behaviour-three-golden-rules-for-ethical-cyber-citizenship-19522 (don't look at me as good at this, but do tell me on failure!) Agreed. A principle I like to keep in mind. Because I mean well, does not implied I am doing good. It is very easy for me, and everyone else, to justify our actions because we mean well. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:04 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical I don't speak on behalf of the Association, but I think your positions are overstated. As far as I know, the Association is still pursing sales of XO laptops and is still supporting XO laptops in the field. Granted the pace of development is slowed and there is -- to my knowledge -- no team in place to develop an follow up to the XO 4.0. I don't have a clue as to what you mean by a technical philanthropy but it remains a non-profit associated dedicated to enhancing learning opportunities through one-to-one computing. The fact that the Association has private-sector partners is nothing new. It has had such partners since its founding in 2006. +1 on Walter's words, David's position is overstated. OLPC has shrunk its Sugar investment, that is true. But on the other points, nothing has changed significantly, OLPC has always had to find sources of funding. As I stated, I hope to be proven wrong. Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. That's more like it ;-) there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. Seeding and supporting projects is how it's done. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 3:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:04 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical I don't speak on behalf of the Association, but I think your positions are overstated. As far as I know, the Association is still pursing sales of XO laptops and is still supporting XO laptops in the field. Granted the pace of development is slowed and there is -- to my knowledge -- no team in place to develop an follow up to the XO 4.0. I don't have a clue as to what you mean by a technical philanthropy but it remains a non-profit associated dedicated to enhancing learning opportunities through one-to-one computing. The fact that the Association has private-sector partners is nothing new. It has had such partners since its founding in 2006. +1 on Walter's words, David's position is overstated. OLPC has shrunk its Sugar investment, that is true. But on the other points, nothing has changed significantly, OLPC has always had to find sources of funding. As I stated, I hope to be proven wrong. You also stated: The degree of openness and transparency is our fundamental disagreement. Best case is that the status quo works, Sugar Labs thrives, and I am proven wrong. Worst case is that Sugar adopts to the changing environment. Several of us have asked for an explanation. Yes, and sorry about the delay. This is a nuanced discussion which requires focusing on goals which can strengthen the project while avoiding recriminations about the past mistakes and individual weakness. The general observation is that open source projects are most effective when they provide a venue for multiple individuals and organizations with overlapping yet non-identical goals to come together to collaborate on a common platform which they can use and adapt for their own purpose. The specific observation about Sugar Labs is that an emphasis on identical goals tends to limit active participants. Outliers tend to be nudged aside. The remaining group of active participants are small but loyal. And yes, I see the irony of posting this observation on the sugar-devel mailing list. Everyone who is troubled by this observation has already left. As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to test datastore was met with silence. I have tried to communicate that there is competition between organizations and deployments within the ecosystem... and that is good. Competition drives innovation. The challenge, as I see it, is for Sugar Labs to become the to common collaborative ground around which these organizations compete. Hope that helps. regards. -walter Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. That's more like it ;-) there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. Seeding and supporting projects is how it's done. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. The three things I am going to takeway from the the thread are: 1. Jame's point about my position about not representing the median. Due to my history and role in the ecosystem, I have upset some apple-carts :( 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. 3. Finally, and most importantly, Daniel's point about getting back to the business of improving Sugar. My proposal is that Activity Central make the next step of funding two developers to work on HTML5 and JS. If we can find a mutually beneficial relationship around this, we can see how we can expand the relationship in the future. Seem reasonable? On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 October 2013 01:14, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. The patch queue is currently empty. In the last six months only one patchset was rejected. It was by Activity Central and it was rejected by me (not an OLPC employee) for purely technical reasons. The proof being that the same patchset landed after being cleaned up and resubmitted properly by another Activity Central developer. More in general, no single developer is in charge of patch reviewing, OLPC couldn't keep code out of the tree for non-technical reason even if they wanted to. More specifically the ability to approve patches was offered to one Activity Central developer, which never used it. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to test datastore was met with silence. Mailing list posts going unanswered isn't really uncommon in free software projects. But most of the time it just means that no one knows the answer or everyone is too busy. Only me and Manuel are usually answering about HTML5. I have not answered because... gmail put those messages in my spam folder, sigh! Most likely the same happened to Manuel or he has been busy. (I need to take some sleep now but I'll try to answer asap). -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical set of questions which will determine the future viability of Sugar. If anyone as more informed, please correct me if I am sharing incorrect information: 1. The Association has dropped future development of XO laptops and Sugar as part of their long term strategy. I base this on the reduction of hardware and software personal employed by the Association. 2. The Association is reducing its roll within the engineering and development side of the ecosystem. I base this on the shift toward integrating existing technology, software, and content from other vendors on the XO tablet. 3. The Association is shifting away from its initial roll as a technical philanthropy to a revenue generating organization structured as a association. I base this on the general shift in conversations and decisions from public to private channels. Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. While painful, the world is better of with a leaner (and meaner) OLPC Association which lives to fight another day. The challenge moving forward is how to develop and maintain the Sugar platform, the universe of activities, and the supporting distributions given the reduction in patronage from the OLPC Association. I, and AC, would be happy to work more closely with Sugar Labs if there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 6:11 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: I agree with your analysis about slow deployment updates versus fast community cycles. In my view, there are two alternatives: * We can slow down a little the Sugar cycle, may be doing one release by year, but I am not sure if will help. The changes will take more time to go to the users? If a deployment miss a update, will need wait a entire year? * Someone can work in a LTS Sugar. That should be good if they can push the fixes they work upstream while they are working in their own project. If someone, individuals or a third party, were willing and able to provide LTS support for a version of Sugar, how would you recommend they go about doing it? With the recent changes to the ecosystem, I am unclear about the current structure, culture, and politics of Sugar Labs. My concern is that in that past several years a number of organization who have participated in Sugar development have left or reduced their participation. When asking them why they left, the most common response is that that they didn't feel they were able to establish or sustain mutually beneficial relationships within the ecosystem. Would you be interesting in looking at cultural, political, and procedural traits which have enabled other free and opensource projects to foster thriving ecosystems? Are these traits present in Sugar Labs? While, I understand it is frustrating for an upstream software developer. A primary tenet of free and open sources software is that then anyone can use and distribute the software as they see fit as long as the source code is made available. The challenge for an upstream is to create an environment where it is more beneficial for individuals and organizations to work together than it is to work independently. To make things more concrete, three areas of concern are Control, Credit, Money: -- Control -- Are there mechanism for publicly making and communicating project direction in a productive manner? Is disagreement accepted and encouraged? -- Credit -- Are there mechanism for publicly acknowledging who participates and adds value to the ecosystem? Is credit shared freely and fairly? -- Money -- Are there mechanisms in place for publicly acknowledge that money pays a role in the ecosystem? Is Sugar Labs able to maintain a neutral base around which people and organizations can collaborate? From my limited experience, I don't believe there is an single holy grail type answer to any of these questions. Instead, the answers tend to evolve as situations change and participants come and go. On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 9:46 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: For phase one this openness in communication, I would like to open the discussion to strategies for working together. My interest is how to deal with the notion of overlapping yet non-identical goals. As a case study, let's look at deployment and developer preferences for stability and innovation. The roll out pipeline for a deployment can be long: 1. Core development. 2. Core validation.. 3. Activity development. 4. Activity validation. 5. Update documentation. 6. Update training materials. 7. Pilot. 8. Roll-out
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:04 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical set of questions which will determine the future viability of Sugar. If anyone as more informed, please correct me if I am sharing incorrect information: 1. The Association has dropped future development of XO laptops and Sugar as part of their long term strategy. I base this on the reduction of hardware and software personal employed by the Association. 2. The Association is reducing its roll within the engineering and development side of the ecosystem. I base this on the shift toward integrating existing technology, software, and content from other vendors on the XO tablet. 3. The Association is shifting away from its initial roll as a technical philanthropy to a revenue generating organization structured as a association. I base this on the general shift in conversations and decisions from public to private channels. I don't speak on behalf of the Association, but I think your positions are overstated. I hope to be proven wrong and the laptop side of the Association regains momentum. As far as I know, the Association is still pursing sales of XO laptops and is still supporting XO laptops in the field. Granted the pace of development is slowed and there is -- to my knowledge -- no team in place to develop an follow up to the XO 4.0. I don't have a clue as to what you mean by a technical philanthropy but it remains a non-profit associated dedicated to enhancing learning opportunities through one-to-one computing. The fact that the Association has private-sector partners is nothing new. It has had such partners since its founding in 2006. Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. While painful, the world is better of with a leaner (and meaner) OLPC Association which lives to fight another day. The challenge moving forward is how to develop and maintain the Sugar platform, the universe of activities, and the supporting distributions given the reduction in patronage from the OLPC Association. I, and AC, would be happy to work more closely with Sugar Labs if there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. I don't understand what you are asking. Sugar Labs has always had a policy of working in the open. The degree of openness and transparency is our fundamental disagreement. Best case is that the status quo works, Sugar Labs thrives, and I am proven wrong. Worst case is that Sugar adopts to the changing environment. That said, Sugar Labs volunteers (yes, we are all volunteers), have on occasion done consulting for OLPC, AC, deployments, and other third parties. Nothing new or unusual about that either. The future of Sugar is incumbant upon its remaining relevant to learning and its maintaining a vibrant upstream community. If you (and AC) want to contribute to the future of Sugar, please work with us upstream, e.g. report bugs upstream, submit patches upstream, test code originating upstream, mentor newbies, etc. Par for the course for any FOSS project. On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 6:11 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: I agree with your analysis about slow deployment updates versus fast community cycles. In my view, there are two alternatives: * We can slow down a little the Sugar cycle, may be doing one release by year, but I am not sure if will help. The changes will take more time to go to the users? If a deployment miss a update, will need wait a entire year? * Someone can work in a LTS Sugar. That should be good if they can push the fixes they work upstream while they are working in their own project. If someone, individuals or a third party, were willing and able to provide LTS support for a version of Sugar, how would you recommend they go about doing it? With the recent changes to the ecosystem, I am unclear about the current structure, culture, and politics of Sugar Labs. My concern is that in that past several years a number of organization who have participated in Sugar development have left or reduced their participation. When asking them why they left, the most common response is that that they didn't feel they were able to establish or sustain mutually beneficial relationships within the ecosystem. Would you be interesting in looking at cultural, political, and procedural traits which have enabled other free and opensource projects to foster thriving ecosystems? Are these traits present in Sugar Labs? While, I understand
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: I agree with your analysis about slow deployment updates versus fast community cycles. In my view, there are two alternatives: * We can slow down a little the Sugar cycle, may be doing one release by year, but I am not sure if will help. The changes will take more time to go to the users? If a deployment miss a update, will need wait a entire year? * Someone can work in a LTS Sugar. That should be good if they can push the fixes they work upstream while they are working in their own project. If someone, individuals or a third party, were willing and able to provide LTS support for a version of Sugar, how would you recommend they go about doing it? With the recent changes to the ecosystem, I am unclear about the current structure, culture, and politics of Sugar Labs. My concern is that in that past several years a number of organization who have participated in Sugar development have left or reduced their participation. When asking them why they left, the most common response is that that they didn't feel they were able to establish or sustain mutually beneficial relationships within the ecosystem. Would you be interesting in looking at cultural, political, and procedural traits which have enabled other free and opensource projects to foster thriving ecosystems? Are these traits present in Sugar Labs? While, I understand it is frustrating for an upstream software developer. A primary tenet of free and open sources software is that then anyone can use and distribute the software as they see fit as long as the source code is made available. The challenge for an upstream is to create an environment where it is more beneficial for individuals and organizations to work together than it is to work independently. To make things more concrete, three areas of concern are Control, Credit, Money: -- Control -- Are there mechanism for publicly making and communicating project direction in a productive manner? Is disagreement accepted and encouraged? -- Credit -- Are there mechanism for publicly acknowledging who participates and adds value to the ecosystem? Is credit shared freely and fairly? -- Money -- Are there mechanisms in place for publicly acknowledge that money pays a role in the ecosystem? Is Sugar Labs able to maintain a neutral base around which people and organizations can collaborate? From my limited experience, I don't believe there is an single holy grail type answer to any of these questions. Instead, the answers tend to evolve as situations change and participants come and go. On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 9:46 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: For phase one this openness in communication, I would like to open the discussion to strategies for working together. My interest is how to deal with the notion of overlapping yet non-identical goals. As a case study, let's look at deployment and developer preferences for stability and innovation. The roll out pipeline for a deployment can be long: 1. Core development. 2. Core validation.. 3. Activity development. 4. Activity validation. 5. Update documentation. 6. Update training materials. 7. Pilot. 8. Roll-out. This can take months, even years. This directly conflicts with the rapid innovation cycle of development used by effective up streams. Good projects constantly improve and refine their speed of innovation. Is is desirable, or even possible, to create a project where these two overlapping yet non-identical needs can be balanced? As a concrete example we could look at the pros and cons of a stable long term support sugar release lead by quick, leading edge releases. For full disclosure, I tried to start this same conversation several years ago. I failed: 1. I did not have the credibility to be take seriously. 2. I did not have the political, social, and technical experience to understand the nuances of engaging with the various parties in the ecosystem. 3. I did not have the emotional control to assertively advocate ideas without aggressively advocating opinions. Has enough changed in the past several years to make it valuable to revisit this conversation publicly? On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: David, Certainly is good know plans, and started a interesting discussion. In eduJam and in Montevideo, I was talking with the new AC hackers, and tried to convince them to work on sugar 0.100 instead of sugar 0.98. Have a lot of sense try to work in the same code if possible, and will be good for your plans of work on web activities. May be we can look at the details, but I agree with you, we should try avoid fragmentation. Gonzalo On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 2:56 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Over the past couple of weeks there has been an interesting thread which started from AC's attempt to clarify
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
For phase one this openness in communication, I would like to open the discussion to strategies for working together. My interest is how to deal with the notion of overlapping yet non-identical goals. As a case study, let's look at deployment and developer preferences for stability and innovation. The roll out pipeline for a deployment can be long: 1. Core development. 2. Core validation.. 3. Activity development. 4. Activity validation. 5. Update documentation. 6. Update training materials. 7. Pilot. 8. Roll-out. This can take months, even years. This directly conflicts with the rapid innovation cycle of development used by effective up streams. Good projects constantly improve and refine their speed of innovation. Is is desirable, or even possible, to create a project where these two overlapping yet non-identical needs can be balanced? As a concrete example we could look at the pros and cons of a stable long term support sugar release lead by quick, leading edge releases. For full disclosure, I tried to start this same conversation several years ago. I failed: 1. I did not have the credibility to be take seriously. 2. I did not have the political, social, and technical experience to understand the nuances of engaging with the various parties in the ecosystem. 3. I did not have the emotional control to assertively advocate ideas without aggressively advocating opinions. Has enough changed in the past several years to make it valuable to revisit this conversation publicly? On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: David, Certainly is good know plans, and started a interesting discussion. In eduJam and in Montevideo, I was talking with the new AC hackers, and tried to convince them to work on sugar 0.100 instead of sugar 0.98. Have a lot of sense try to work in the same code if possible, and will be good for your plans of work on web activities. May be we can look at the details, but I agree with you, we should try avoid fragmentation. Gonzalo On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 2:56 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Over the past couple of weeks there has been an interesting thread which started from AC's attempt to clarify our priorities for the next couple of months. One of the most interesting aspects has been the interplay between private/political vs. public/vision discussions. There seem to be several people and organizations with overlapping yet slightly different goals. Is there interest in seeing how these people and organizations can work together towards a common goal? Are we happy with the current degree of fragmentation? I fully admit my role in the current fragmentation. One of the reasons I started AC was KARMA. At the time I was frustrated because I felt that ideas such as karma were being judged on who controlled or received credit for them instead of their value to deployments. We hired several key sugar hackers and forked Sugar to work on the problem. While effective at creating a third voice in the ecosystem, (The association has shifted more effort towards supporting deployments and Sugar Labs via OLPC-AU is up streaming many of our deployment specific patches) my approach was heavy handed and indulgent... and I apologize for that. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
Over the past couple of weeks there has been an interesting thread which started from AC's attempt to clarify our priorities for the next couple of months. One of the most interesting aspects has been the interplay between private/political vs. public/vision discussions. There seem to be several people and organizations with overlapping yet slightly different goals. Is there interest in seeing how these people and organizations can work together towards a common goal? Are we happy with the current degree of fragmentation? I fully admit my role in the current fragmentation. One of the reasons I started AC was KARMA. At the time I was frustrated because I felt that ideas such as karma were being judged on who controlled or received credit for them instead of their value to deployments. We hired several key sugar hackers and forked Sugar to work on the problem. While effective at creating a third voice in the ecosystem, (The association has shifted more effort towards supporting deployments and Sugar Labs via OLPC-AU is up streaming many of our deployment specific patches) my approach was heavy handed and indulgent... and I apologize for that. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Activity Central's Sugar related priorities.
On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 6:07 PM, Samuel Greenfeld greenf...@laptop.org wrote: This actually is kind of what I meant (and perhaps should be a separate thread). My understanding is that deployments nowadays are the primary parties funding Sugar development. And the deployments or their contractors sometimes duplicate work, run into debates upstreaming things, and/or may choose to keep some things semi-private to differentiate their products. So apart from major functionality like HTML5 activities, a lot of peripheral development is happening downstream-first. And when we do try to do major cross-group development like the GTK3 port, this has lead to finger-pointing behind the scenes where it is claimed others are not doing what they promised. To the best of my knowledge no single organization currently employs enough developers and/or contractors to keep Sugar development alive. I am not certain what the best approach to take is when this is the case. Thanks to everyone for their feedback on this thread. As Samuel points out, over the last several years, the ecosystem has evolved from a single entity into a number of organisations with overlapping, but not identical, goals. This opens the door for a competitive ecosystem such as the kernel which thrives by making it more effective to compete on top of a collaboratively developed foundation rather than going it alone. In this case, I don't know how the upstream / downstream relationship will look. My feeling is that it will require us as individuals and organizations to look at how we currently benefit (and struggle) by competing and how we can set aside our egos and benefit by collaborating. In the coming weeks, Ruben and Anish will be available on the mailing lists and at the conference in San Francisco to discuss if working together is mutually desirable. From there, we can go in to the technical aspects of how to make that happen. On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 6:22 PM, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote: On Tue, Oct 08, 2013 at 12:00:47AM +0200, Daniel Narvaez wrote: Well everyone seems to be developing their own version of Sugar seems to be more than that. But maybe I'm just reading too much into it. There aren't multiple groups of people or individuals developing sugar on their own. As far as I know all the work that is being done these days is going upstream. Good. I only know of four Sugars. Sugar upstream, Dextrose, what is in OLPC OS, and what is in the Australian builds. There might be more, but I'm not aware of them. I also don't know the difference between each. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Devel mailing list de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Activity Central's Sugar related priorities.
As a data point for other decision makers and a follow up to some of the recent threads on the future of Sugar, I would like to share Activity Central's Sugar priorities for the next six months. Activity Central supports the recent HTML5 + JS work that is going into sugar .100. It has the potential to take the OLPC vision to any device which runs a browser while simultaneously increasing the potential activity developer pool by several orders of magnitude. This is an excellent area for community lead research. Activity Central will be doing activity side work to test the viability of the framework for client deployments. As a more incremental approach, Activity Central will continue our deployment-centric work by porting Dextrose to Ubuntu. A concern among deployments is the future availability of hardware to support their current investment. Deployments are concerned that laptop support will stop before tablets are ready for use in the field. Because of the controversial nature of this work and the potential for disruption it may cause to the Association, we understand if some people would prefer to sit this out. Would either of these list be appropriate to continue these discussions about this downstream efforts to port sugar to Ubuntu for use on hardware not sold by the Association? Phase one has been a poof of concept as seen at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Ubuntu (ongoing) Phase two will be opening the project to the community. Phases three will be testing and piloting by deployments. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2013-09-16
that can also be used for testing [11]. Meanwhile, the previous release of Sugar (98.8) is available on Ubuntu (12.04) [12] thanks to the efforts of Quidam. === Sugar Labs === 8. Please visit (and contribute to) our planet [13]. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/no-child-left-untableted.html [2] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/09/15/magazine/15klein3/15klein3-sfSpan.jpg [3] http://developer.sugarlabs.org/web-architecture.md.html [4] http://developer.sugarlabs.org/android.md.html [5] http://people.sugarlabs.org/walter/Guia_Ingles_10-08-2013.pdf (en) [6] http://people.sugarlabs.org/walter/Guia_Esp_12-08-2013.pdf (es) [7] http://ceibaljam.org/drupal/?q=edujam2013 [8] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2013 [9] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/query?status=newstatus=assignedstatus=acceptedstatus=reopenedpriority=Immediatepriority=Urgentcomponent=Sugarstatus_field=Neworder=priority [10] http://build.laptop.org.au/xo/os/sugar-100 [11] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Fedora_20#SoaS_86_64-dm_.28remix.29 [12] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Ubuntu#Ubuntu_12.04.2_LTS_-_Dextrose_Sugar_Live [13] http://planet.sugarlab.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Fwd: [XSCE] Re: Client side Moodle transparent auth broken in 13.2.0 stable
On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 1:15 PM, Jerry Vonau je...@laptop.org.au wrote: Good to hear from you Martin. Just to finish this thread off, I was not able to reproduce this behavior with the XO-1s that I have. This appears to affect Anna's machines only. Thanks for the hints to what might be the root cause. Thanks for the greeting! I had a season of detox after some severe burnout. I'm spending this weekend at Fedora Flock for personal enjoyment, and it's brought me back to the OLPC topic. Welcome back! I look forward to seeing your head and opinions poking up now and again :) About Anna's machines -- I suspect either an old OFW or bad/broken/misconfigured manufacturing data. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] XSCE Update
Time for the second installment to the XSCE Update. - Deployments- 1. Bhagmalpur, India - http://bhagmalpur.wordpress.com/ . The update to XSCE is complete in Bhagmalpur. It will be interesting to see what Sameer concluded based on the statistics generation system. -- Thanks Sameer and Anish 2. Haiti - http://haitidreams.wordpress.com/ . Haiti was the first 'real world test' for XSCE started a couple of months ago. Many of the ideas for XSCE come from George's and Adam's experiences maintaining the deployment. -- Thanks George and Adam 3. OLPC Australia - https://www.laptop.org.au/ . Much of the planning for XSCE comes from the experience of Jerry, the lead developer of OLPC AU. Jerry lives in Canada while maintaining a 5000 unit deployment which is is the process of expanding to 50,000 XO4s. -- Thanks Jerry 4. Solomon Islands - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Solomon_Islands . Working with David has been a great help to the project. For the past couple of weeks, David has been asking a series of questions about testing and deploying XSCE in the Solomon Islands. Many of the questions involve working in a low bandwidth environment. We hope we learn from his questions and can create something which meets his needs. -- Thanks David 5. Dominican Republic - http://olpcdr.wordpress.com/ . Last week Ruben, from OLPC-A, joined the #schoolserver mailing list to ask some questions about deploying XSCE in the Dominican Republic. I hope this is a sign of growing cooperation between OLPC-A and XSCE. -- Thanks Ruben -Development - Santiago started using our new gIt workflow as documented at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition/0.4/Hacking . We hope the recent modularization and the new workflow will make it easier for deployment to upstream their hard work with needing to understand the entire system. If you are interested in tracking progress please see https://sugardextrose.org/projects/xsce/repository . -- Thanks Santi, Tim, George - What does the SchoolServer Serve? :) - For a general overview of the School Server please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition . More specifically, a number of existing projects are working with XSCE to provide their content. XSCE's plug in design allow these projects to easily prepare their project for inclusion in XSCE 1. Internet in a Box - http://internet-in-a-box.org/ . It looks like IIAB will ship as an add on with 0.4 in Sept. -- Thanks Braddock 2. Pathagar. - https://github.com/PathagarBooks/pathagar . Pathagar is a simple book server for making custom libraries available to deployments. Pathagar is interesting because it allow curators to use widely available, cross platform tools such as http://calibre-ebook.com/ to maintain those libraries. -- Thanks Seth As always, please help us met your deployment or project's needs. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Patches -- Process and Culture
On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 7:13 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: Hey, want to start on that kind of analysis? :) James' self analysis is spot on. We all wear several 'hats' Sugar contributor, Employee or volunteer, person, . These hats bring bias which affect our decision making. To use myself as an example: I am squeezed between money and power. Activity Central provides technical service and support for deployments. Deployments pay us to meet very specific needs for them. Money -- Deployment pay us _only_what they think a fix or issues is worth to them. We, in turn, can only pay one of our developers what the deployment thinks their work is worth. Power -- Deployments tell us _exactly_ what they want us to do and how much time they are willing to pay us to do it. The business model meets a need which adds value to the ecosystem. However it does introduce conflicts. In the context of this discussion a key conflict is cost and value of up-streaming deployment specific 'fixes'. Dave I've been considering some cultural factors but they are not related to prestige and moneys, so they are probably pretty different from what you have in mind here. On Wednesday, 27 March 2013, David Farning wrote: Daniel Narvaez reopened an interesting thread that comes up every couple of years -- patch approval. This is an interesting and important issue to both the Sugar community and the OLPC ecosystem. In parallel to patch process, a discussion about culture might be beneficial. Sugar and OLPC are unique from many other free software projects. There is a significant amount of prestige power, and money at stake. Implementation of any specific patch process might be enhanced by considering cultural factors at play. -- David Farning ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Daniel Narvaez -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Patches -- Process and Culture
Daniel Narvaez reopened an interesting thread that comes up every couple of years -- patch approval. This is an interesting and important issue to both the Sugar community and the OLPC ecosystem. In parallel to patch process, a discussion about culture might be beneficial. Sugar and OLPC are unique from many other free software projects. There is a significant amount of prestige power, and money at stake. Implementation of any specific patch process might be enhanced by considering cultural factors at play. -- David Farning ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] Dextrose 3 patches report
2011/12/5 Chris Leonard cjlhomeaddr...@gmail.com: 2011/12/5 Rubén Rodríguez ru...@gnu.org: I will be sure to communicate to this list (and especially directly to Bernie) as that work moves forward, especially once we get an upstream commit of the glibc locales. Please ping me too if you modify the locale definitions, as we don't get them from glibc for TOAST. Yes, of course. I appreciate Dextrose and Trisquel / TOAST being willing to hand manage the draft locales for now as we refine them. I will be sure to broadcast to this list and narrow-cast to those working on the Puno image when the glibc locales are upstreamed. The main reason for not including in SL Sugar at this point is that we have encountered issues with builds of Activities for langs without a glibc locale and there is no urgent need for SL and OLPC to manage a local glibc file at the moment, I think waiting for the upstreaming makes sense for them. Of course, if anyone wants the draft locales, I would be happy to share them. Plus one. A core vision of Dextrose is to serve as a testing platform for things which are requested or required by individual deployments. Then after a period of refinement they can be pushed upstream if they are valuable and useful. david cjl ___ Dextrose mailing list dextr...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/dextrose ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Promoting Pablo Flores to CEO of Activity Central
I am proud to announce that we are promoting Pablo Flores as the new CEO of Activity Central. Pablo has a strong background in all things OLPC and Sugar from his time at Plan Ceibal, leadership in Ceibal Jam, and most recently as community architect for Activity Central. Pablo and the rest of the Activity Central team will continue the core AC mission of providing service and support for deployments. I will continue my work in the Sugar/OLPC ecosystem by focusing on the junction point between deployment technical teams and education teams. My research so far has lead me to the notion of learning objects. While poorly defined in the education literature, the vocabulary around learning objects seems to lends itself to the intersection of technical personal and education personal in early childhood education. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Sugar Labs Oversight Board - Candidacy
I, David Farning, would like to announce my candidacy for a position on the Sugar Labs Oversight Board. As a member on the original Sugar Labs Oversight Board, I came to feel that as much as I believed in the vision of OLPC and Sugar Labs there were a number of needs in the ecosystem which could be met by a third organization. 1. The voice and needs of deployments were being over shadowed by the global voice of Sugar Labs and OLPC. 2. There was no organization provide service and support for deployments. As a result, deployments required a significant amount of technical sophistication before they could get started. 3. Because of the volunteer nature of Sugar Labs, developers tended to work on the interesting and innovative problems rather than the daily grind necessary to deliver a fully polished educational platform. For the past two years I, and a number of other developers, have been establishing Activity Central [1] to help fill the above needs. Our model is to provide technical service and support to deployments. This effort has resulted in the Dextrose [2] operation system which we custom develop and support for several large and small deployment. Because we depend on customer revenue for our sustainability we have a strong incentive to meet the software needs of deployments. Because Dextrose is based on Upstream Sugar and OLPC OS releases Activity Central has a strong incentive to assist in the continued success of Sugar Labs and OLPC. To this end we have made a number of commitments: 1. All code written by Activity Central developers will be released with an open source license. 2. Activity Central developers spend 60% of their time on revenue generating work. They are free to spend the remaining 40% of their time on projects which are of general value to the ecosystem. 3. Activity Central supports a Community Architect whose job is identify and support local and global communities that are valuable parts of the Sugar Labs and OLPC ecosystem. From time to time I am asked why I chose to form a third organization rather than work within Sugar Labs or OLPC. A third global organization brings several advantages to the ecosystem: 1. It promotes cooperative decision making. When the ecosystem consisted of two primary participants, Sugar Labs and OLP, there was a tendency for competitive decision making. When a third player was added to the mix, the value of cooperative decision making become more apparent. 2. Organizations with a business focus often provide value to a Free Software ecosystem. Interestingly OLPC-A has seen this and has been shifting toward a 'social entrepreneurship' model. 3. Activity Central approaches the ecosystem from a different viewpoint than either sugar Labs or OLPC. As global innovators both Sugar Labs' and OLPC's strengths are top down. Ideas and Implementations flow down from the central organization to deployments and users. As a service provider, most of Activity Central's ideas and implementation flow up from deployments and user. Our work flow is to solve issues faced by individual deployments which we generalize and push upstream. thank you, David Farning 1. http://activitycentral.com/ 2. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] About Activity Central and Dextrose (was: [ANNOUNCE] New Dextrose-3 development build: Alpha-1 (dx3ng36))
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 6:47 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: Thanks Gonzalo On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Sascha Silbe si...@activitycentral.com wrote: Excerpts from Gonzalo Odiard's message of Thu Sep 01 21:24:31 +0200 2011: There are a public list of patches? Not just a list, the patches themselves are public [1]. Sascha [1] https://people.sugarlabs.org/~silbe/dextrose/patchsets/ -- http://sascha.silbe.org/ http://www.infra-silbe.de/ One of our goals for DX4 will be to streamline the patch maintenance process. That is something to look at for Q1 2012. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Adjusted some owners in trac
-Original Message- From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel- boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Simon Schampijer Sent: Monday, June 06, 2011 6:51 AM To: Sugar Devel Subject: [Sugar-devel] Adjusted some owners in trac Hi, I adjusted those two component owners in trac. In both cases Gonzalo have been doing work and bug fixes and maintainership has been given over. +1. Gonzalo has been doing great work. He brings three important skills to the game: 1. The technical ability to solve issues 2. The engineering ability to assess what issues are important and what issues are not important. 3. The social ability to work effectively in an open source community from within a OLPC Nice work and nice decision :) david Read: Sayamindu--- Gonzalo Odiard Write: uwog --- Gonzalo Odiard Regards, Simon ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] cookie licker
On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 1:10 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote: There's both a pattern and an anti-pattern here, and I saw both during my OLPC v1 days, circa 2008. There were certain features that we were assured had a brilliant and complicated design that was just waiting to be implemented and the implementer never got around to either documenting the design or implementing it. There were other features that got reimplemented several different times in equally-bad ways because no one involved would take the time to get all the stakeholders together and have a good discussion before charging off to do something. The results were short-sighted solutions to one person's view which ignored broader context. Debian has it right here -- everyone is encouraged to adopt unmaintained projects, no stigma attached -- but there's *also* a definite communication process beforehand which attempts to survey the stakeholders and ensure that people don't go charging off blindly. I don't know to what degree these two sides of the pendulum exist in our present community. At EduJam I saw a lot of communication-before-implementation, which is good, and I didn't see any territoriality about projects. For my part I was attempting to participate in the Journal discussions with a big but I don't have time to implement this! disclaimer to avoid any appearance that I was licking the cookie. So things seem good (in my limited view). +1 The structure of EduJAM tried to take this into account. We took precautions to discourage that neither OLPC-F, OLPC-A, Plan Ceibal, nor Activity Central presented organizational design roadmaps about where sugar or the OS 'should' going. Instead the format went: 1. Tour of schools. 2. Meet and greet. 3. General deployment discussions. 4. Specific development issue discussions. 5. Group hack time The intended work flow was: 1. Establish shared goals 2. Establish shared relationships 3. Refine shared goals 4. Discuss specific implementation of refine (yet shared) goals 5. Implement specific goals. Based on the recent threads in olpc-devel and sugar-develop the results have positive so far. david We are looking at sponsoring an 'education practitioner' focused event in 5 to 6 month that follows the same general work flow. But it's certainly worth keeping both sides of the danger in mind. And now we have a clever name for half of it. (I have a name I use for the other half, too, but I shouldn't post it on a public list. ;-) --scott -- ( http://cscott.net ) ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] cookie licker
Brilliant anti-pattern :) Cookie licker - Picture a child who has had enough cookies, but wants to save the last one for later. So they take it off the plate and lick it, to ensure no-one else will eat it. The same phenomenon exists for community projects - prominent community members reserve key features on the roadmap for themselves, potentially depriving others of good opportunities to contribute. Beware of over-committing, and leave space for community contributions in project roadmaps. Be clear on what you will and will not do. [1] How many of us have given into the temptation of licking a cookie or two :( David 1 - http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2011/01/open-source-community-building-a-guide- to-getting-it-right/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Browse activity
Medium term, Activity Central has offered Lucian a job to work on the browser situation. Lucian will be finishing school and wrapping up lose ends for the next couple of month. Short term, I have have trouble justifying funding someone to work on browse until: 1. Sugar Labs starts actively recruiting developers and 2. Certain people from within OLPC stop recommending that deployments not work with Activity Central. This is an ecosystem with several players who must work together to make Sugar/OLPC succeed. david On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: May be replacing Browse with Surf is the right solution, but in the short term we need work improving Browse. I can help reviewing patches and doing releases if you want. Gonzalo On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 11:59 AM, Sascha Silbe si...@activitycentral.com wrote: Excerpts from Gonzalo Odiard's message of Wed May 18 15:46:07 +0200 2011: According to git, nobody is working in Browse master. Lucian and me are the current maintainers [1]. However, we are already busy with other work and thus usually only handle patch review and releases, not work on Browse ourselves [2]. Given the current state of affairs regarding xulrunner and python-xpcom, Browse needs to be replaced by a WebKit based browser activity ASAP. All non-bugfix work should focus on Surf. Sascha [1] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Release/Modules#Browse [2] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-June/024747.html -- http://sascha.silbe.org/ http://www.infra-silbe.de/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 2.
Another day of EduJAM is over. The Event coordinators from Ceibal Jam set an impressively high bar for future conferences. The morning centered around Status and Plans reports from deployments. Plan Ceibal started the day with a session on the technical status and efficacy of the project. Representatives of Nepal, Rwanda, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina participated in a panel discussion about the status and plans for their deployments. The reports were mainly from people implementing technical aspects of the project rather than official spokes people. As such, they were remarkably open and constructive. The third session was about Sugar on non-XO hardware. It is an open question which several deployments are studying. The afternoon was an unconference. There were three tracks in which speakers gave a series of 30 minute talks. The format worked well. Other Sugar and OLPC events have gotten a bit unruly as people's passions overflowed. This event had a lot of listening and learning followed by conversations over dinner. The unconference session gave a chance for many people to give uninterrupted 30 minute talks of personal interest. Participants were able to 'vote with their feet' about what they personally found valuable. Tomorrow kicks off the first day of the code sprint. Wish us luck. Thanks to everyone that participated. I made a (significant to me) investment in this event. The Return on Investment for the community and Activity Central was quite a bit above what I expected! david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 1.
We finished EduJam day 1. There were two track which I will call technical and boundary. The technical track included a series of talk about developing and maintaining Sugar followed by a talk on advanced Etoys by Bert Freudenberg. If you get a chance, please attend a future EduJam just to meet Bert. In email, all we see is his German efficiency. In person he is one of the nicest and most thoughtful people I have ever met! The other track was the boundary track. It explored the boundaries of the tech side project. The morning was social boundaries as the panels explored tools for engaging a broader community, how to effectively build a community, and how to engage in conversation between technical people and educators. The afternoon was an exploration of the boundaries of the technology. The talks and panels were exploring the questions, Where will sugar go and where will the XO go? As is often the case the hallway track is the unsung hero conferences. It was great to see Pablo and Christoph with their heads together discussing the role and importance and moderation in this type of event. Another small cluster included Martin Langhoff, Bernie, and Tch discussing patch flow. Bernie was waving his hands wildly. Langhoff was adjusting his glasses with great intensity. Tch was quietly listening with his (frequently used) expression of, Ok, now how in the heck am I supposed to make this work. :) Carlos Rabassa triggered my Ahh Ha moment in the hallway. He made a comment about the sales principle that is it more effective to keep you current customers happy than it is to reach new customers. While customer might not be the correct term. The general principle of focusing on making the most of current relationships with developers, educators and deployments before trying to establish new relationships seems to apply rather well. Over the past week we have met many people who have the potential to become key contributors to the ecosystem and tomorrow's community leaders. Now we have to identify, engage, enable, and empower them. david -- ten key ideas of customer satisfaction. 1. Do you realize the value of your current customers? These are your best accounts. They are quicker to buy and require fewer special deals. Never take your customers for granted! 2. Do you communicate to all your customers that they are important? 3. Do you encourage customers to return to your business? 4. Do you tailor your services to your customers' particular needs? 5. Do your customers call you when they have a tough problem? 6. Do you provide unique services that your customers would find difficult to duplicate somewhere else? 7. Do your customers feel that you are concerned about their interests and welfare? 8. Do you attempt to learn as much about each customer as possible? 9. Do you follow up to make sure orders are filled quickly and accurately? 10. Do you follow up on complaints to make sure the resolution was satisfactory to the customer? ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] alsroot, Tch, and Anish have arrived!
After much worrying and struggling with embassies and consulates around the globe. Alsroot, Tch, and Anish have made it to Montevideo :) David P.S. I pretend to be calm but have I been worrying about their ability to attend. Yet, again the crew from CeibalJam came through! ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 2 Tour of Uruguay
-Original Message- From: qu...@us.netrek.org [mailto:qu...@us.netrek.org] On Behalf Of James Cameron Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2011 4:47 AM To: David Farning Cc: 'IAEP'; 'Sugar Devel' Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 2 Tour of Uruguay On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 04:24:53PM -0300, David Farning wrote: From a tech point of view, the big question have been: 4. questions about why touch pad behavior has changed in the latest release with out giving teachers a heads up. I don't know what release they are using, or were using. I don't know if they mean XO-1.5 or XO-1. XO-1.5 touchpad behaviour was changed; tap to click was disabled or enabled. Default varied by release, and the default should be configurable. XO-1 touchpad behaviour was changed. Latest OLPC release on XO-1 is 10.1.3, which has no touchpad change compared to 10.1.2, so I presume they were on 8.2.1 or a derivative previously? Two XO-1 changes may be relevant: 1. the enabling of automatic power management from 8.2.1 to 10.1.3, which causes touchpad to be momentarily unresponsive when the laptop is suspended; this is in the release notes [1], so OLPC did include a heads up, 2. the revised kernel driver for XO-1 touchpad [2], which changes the behaviour somewhat; this is not in the release notes. It went in with 10.1.1. Please encourage them to be involved in testing of development builds, so that they can provide feedback early. +1. And we should also consider this is a custom spin for UY. So effective QA will involve: 1. Sugar. 2. OLPC. 3. AC -- if they chose. 4. In country development staff. 5. Users. From what I can see, the idea that the benefits of working together is starting to outweigh the costs for many of the participants and organizations :) david [1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.3#XO- 1_Automatic_power_management_issues [2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Touchpad_driver_changes -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 3 Tour of Uruguay
The theme for day was using the XO to help kids learn. Because this is not my area of expertise I will defer summarizing the day and take a moment to explain the rational for a technical focused summit for an education project. There are two aspect to the OLPC ecosystem, technological and educational. Technologically we face three general classes of problems: hardware, software, and connectivity. When these three aspects of the project work, teachers and students have an outstanding tool. When one or more of these aspects is not working teachers and students have a suboptimal tool. Once the tool is created and understood, educators can train teachers to take advantage of the tool, create content which builds on the affordances of the tool, and create curriculum which enable teachers to build on their understanding and available content to create lessons which align with the needs of their class, school, and country. The vision for EduJAM Montevideo 2011 is to bring people working on the technical aspects together to learn from each other and understand the needs of educators though a series of presentations and conversations. The goal of this process is: 1. Better understand educators needs. 2. Learn how we as developers and engineers can make a product which is more effective for educators. 3. Learn and communicate with our fellow developers and engineers to learn to work more effectively. Ideally, another organization will sponsor a complementary event which focuses on how educators can leverage the tool to enhance learning. These complementary events can form the nucleus for a dialog which drive the project forward. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 1.5 Tour of Uruguay
In the afternoon, our visit to the school was rained out. Instead we went to a local festival, after which two teachers joined us on the bus. There is a reoccurring theme of, There is no benefit in complaining about the hurdles, they are part of life. Let's, get the job doing. As this series of post is dedicated to helping the technical side of the project support the education side. The fascinating takeaway was how the availability of the Aurora project is enabling other education projects. The region we are visiting has been suffering from migration issues as people move from agricultural regions to the urban centers because of the availability of opportunities. One issues is the low attendance and completion of residents to secondary education. Historically, secondary education required that student take a bus which was paid for by the parents to attend high school. Now, with the connectivity made available via the Aurora projects and widespread exposure of computers via the OLPC projects, adults are saying, Hmmm, is it possible for me to finish my high school education using these tools? The local teachers are saying sure we can do this via a virtual platform using existing tools such as Moodle. The most interesting takeaway for me was the statement that content was not an issue. One teacher responded, We are high school teacher. We understand the required content and curriculum. We work with it every day. These teacher just want the tools to distribute that content they already have. Another couple of superstar teachers:) ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Olidata computers in Uruguay
-Original Message- From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel- boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Gary Martin Sent: Monday, May 02, 2011 2:13 PM To: Yamandu Ploskonka Cc: IAEP SugarLabs; Sugar-dev Devel Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Olidata computers in Uruguay On 2 May 2011, at 16:47, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote: the Sur list is following this thread in detail, I just wanted to share a FYI for developers. 30,000 Olidata laptops have been purchased by Ceibal at $130 apiece and teachers are being upgraded to those, trading in their XOs. Thanks for raising this issue! I've cc:ed the sugar-devel list as it's the first I've read of this. +1 We had the opportunity to work with one of these machines this morning. It looks like we should start looking into supporting this piece of hardware. After looking at this for the past couple of weeks, I looks like installing the Fedora based SoaS appears to be the path of least resistance. The unit we saw this morning seems to be the most recent stock SoaS + 80% of the dextrose patches + a patch set developed by Uruguay. David One of the most noticeable source for incompatibilities seems to be screen definition, 800x600 in the Olidata, and thus several Activities are cropped, Ouch, quite a few Activity toolbars will likely overflow at 800x600 (overflow widgets land in a drop down menu in the far right of the toolbar that shows the text from the tool button hint only). The XO is a 1200x900 screen, about a year or two back there was general consensus that we should try and make sure Activities worked well down too 1024x768 as that was common in emulated environments and regular laptops/desktops. These 800x600 display machines will want to make sure they are running Sugar using an environmental variable of SUGAR_SCALING=72, this will shrink the UI scale down to fit the lower screen resolution. SUGAR_SCALING currently only has an effect at either 72 (works well for 800x600 and 1024x768) or 100 (for 1200x900 or larger). There will likely still be activities drawing their canvas with hard coded expectations of screen size, but hopefully these will be reasonably few in number by now. Please file a ticket if you find any (bugs.sugarlabs.org), or feel free to email me and I'll try and chase them up. One last additional issue you may find is with the dpi of text. Some activities may seem to display overly large or small text fonts. This issue is quite a black art to solve well, but still worth keeping an eye out for and reporting back to the Activity developer. Regards, --Gary maybe something to be aware of. Etoys appears to have been fixed already. On 05/02/2011 02:15 AM, nanon...@mediagala.com wrote: El pLan Ceibal en Uruguay está entregando a las Aaestras de Primaria las Olidata Jump PC, con disco flash de 8 GB http://www.olidata.cl/index.php/netbook_web/show/id/10 Las olidata se las dan a las MAestras a cambio de sus XO. Me parece una decisión errada, ya que la intención del PLan ceibal es darles a las Maestras una maquina más potente y al día (con respecto a las XO 1 de los niños, de hace dos o tres años), pero eso me parece un gran disparate, no puede ser que la MAestra no pueda hacer pruebas sobre las XO de los Niños. La MAestra tiene que entregar su XO 1.0 al Plan Ceibal (que le fue entregada hace un par de años) y el Plan ceibal se la cambia por una Olidata. El Año pasado fueron compradas 30.000 olidata , según la pagina web institucional del Plan Ceibal. --- Una cosa que no me parece correcta es que la laptop de maestra sea diferente ala XO: tiene más capacidad ara el Diario, eso es bueno(8 Gb contra 1 Gb), pero la pantalla es diferente, el hardware es distinto, y el sugar no funciona en forma identica, por lo tanto cualquier cosa que la Maestra use en su Laptop no podrá ser repetido por los alumnos de la misma forma. NO tiene sentido querer darle una maquina más potente a las MAestras, ya que si por ejemplo la Maestra hace una actividad Etoys en su casa , usando sonidos, animación , etc etc, luego va a la clase y le dice a los niños que lo repitan, pero resulta que lo mismo en las Xo tal vez va mas lento, o no funciona igual, o se ve solo en partes Si se le quiere dar una maquina más potente a las Maestras, deberían dejar que tengan las dos: la potente y la XO normal de los Niños. En este momento se les cambia la XO por la Olidata. NOTA: cuando digo potente (hablando de la Olidata ), es en tono jocoso, espero que se entienda. La Olidata Tiene la pantalla un poco más chica que la XO , de 7 y 800x400, en cambio la XO es de 7.5 y de 1200x900 Debe ser por esa razón que ciertas actividades se ven cortadas, al igual que sucede con los emuladores. Estaría bueno que los programadores hicieran como ya hicieron con ETOYS, que lo modificaron especialmente por
[Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 2 Tour of Uruguay
This morning we are in a classroom observing (and after a few minutes participating) in a class room session involving turtle art. The first task was to draw a rectangle with two side being 3 cm long and the other two side being less then 3 cm. This involved using as ruler to determine how many turtle steps in a centimeter. Step 2 was doing this with the repeat block. Step 3 was attaching a right triangle which shared a side with the rectangle. At this school, I am not sure how wide spread the practice is, the teachers work from a daily curriculum. It is up to them to build us of the XO into the lesson plan. Once per week a plan Ceibal teacher trainer come to the school to help the teacher create learning task which align with the upcoming curriculum. Using this system of training the trainer appears to be a cost effective method of scaling expertise. From a tech point of view, the big question have been: 1. Running sugar on non-xo hardware. 2. The journal is a bit confusing. 3. Print is a must. 4. questions about why touch pad behavior has changed in the latest release with out giving teachers a heads up. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 2.5 Tour of Uruguay
The afternoon and evening sessions of the tour were a great complement to the morning session. Yes, you heard correctly, afternoon _and_ evening sessions:) Pablo has us hopping. Tomorrow morning starts a 600am. The afternoon session was again at public school 286. Rather than observe and interact with the kids in the class room, the teachers asked us to take a step back and look at the larger picture of how the laptop project affect the school and how the school affects the project. One interesting note was the emphasis they had that the laptops were educational tools. They were part of a larger tool box consisting of textbooks and other activities. While kids usually receive their laptop at 6, when they start school, it is common for kids to begin using and becoming familiar with the laptop and sugar when they are 4 years old. By the time kids enter high school they have had several years of experience. This presents a challenge for teachers as they try to catch up and keep up with the kids :) The primary technical requests were that social-calc works and that there is timeline activity. In terms of education theory, it was interesting to listen to a discussion the evolved from the timeline request. Several teachers commented that the timeline was a very valuable tool because it would give the students a place to consolidate the information they had learned over several week. Maybe it was my poor Spanish. But the conversation seemed to reflect concepts very similar to portfolios and the act of refection the journal affords. The evening session was with Flordeceibo. (http://www.flordeceibo.edu.uy/ ) We started the evening off with a video providing an overview of project. It is just over 2.5G so I hope that someone with some bandwidth uploads it and links to it in a blog post. Sadly, the university and Flordeceibo are not directly involved in teacher training. Teacher education happens in a parallel system similar to normal schools. The real meat of the session (for software developers) happened after the break during a feedback session. Several of the Flordeceibo members had lists of bugs they have encountered during the last few years. At that point the passion became palpable. Because of the sheer amount of feedback we invited everyone to share 'headlines' of their concerns at this session. Then, follow up Sunday morning at the first day of the hack feast. Over the last couple of months one on the most important lessons we have learn while working with ParaguayEduca is the importance of one on one and face to face sessions between developers and educators. The normal tools that open source developers use for feedback are too 'unfamiliar' to most teachers. Instead the feedback, at least initially, requires a personal relationship which builds trust and helps the developer and educator learn how to effectively communicate. As a result, we invited everyone to join the sugar camp on Sunday morning. I would like to encourage all developers to spend time talking one on one with the Flordeceibo members to turn their feedback into a format which is can be submitted as bug reports. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Awesome day 0 for eduJAM.
Yesterday was have picture perfect start to eduJAM! The day was planned by the Ceibal-volunteer associations as part of their annual (sometime biannual) meeting. For lack of a better word, my Spanish is still rather fuzzy, I will use the term Ceibal-volunteer associations to describe Ceibal-Jam, Rap-Ceibal, and Flordeceibo. Many of us in Sugar Labs are familiar with Ceibal-Jam, the software-arm of the project, from the public work at http://ceibaljam.org/ . Particularly interesting is their work on Sugar activities at http://ceibaljam.org/drupal/?q=lista_proyectos . Rap-Ceibal is the volunteer support organization. There public work is at http://rapceibal.blogspot.com/ . They are doing really interesting work creating regional centers. Basic service and support happens in the schools, while more complicated or specialized service and support happen in the regional centers. It is a great model. Thirdly, Flordeceibo, is the education arm that builds on the technical work of Ceibal-Jam, Rap-Ceibal, and other organization to enable a efficient and effective education for student in Uruguay. http://www.flordeceibo.edu.uy/ The morning started with the groups giving status reports of current projects and roadmaps for next year. It was a great example of people saying, 'we see a problem and we are trying to fix it.' The afternoon was a series of videoconferences with distant schools. Groups from various school shared their experiences and concern. This was followed by an open discussion on how to meet their needs. Midafternoon we broke up and shared a meal, ( The proper translation for the dish was 'delicious heart attack on a plate' ) with others planning on attending the Tour of Uruguay. Overall two thumbs up to everyone involved. As special shout out to Antel, a Uruguayan telecommunications firm, for providing the facilities -- which included an video conferencing system that would make any hacker want to get in there and take in apart to figure out how it works :) The moderator, Latise (sp?) did an outstanding job of keeping the program running smoothly and on schedule. Which can be harder than it appeared when you have a room full of smart, curious, and passionate people. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] EduJam
Today kicks off EduJAM. EduJAM looks to be a great 1-to-1, OLPC, and Sugar event with participants from many sectors of the community. Congratulation to the great people from http://ceibaljam.org/ for hosting and coordinating the event. There will be diverse offerings for participants, both volunteer and paid, from a wide range of perspectives. Keeping in line with the goals of the project, the overall structure of EduJAM moves from education to the technology which supports education as the week progress. April 30 -May 4 is the tour of Uruguay. ( http://ceibaljam.org/node/1233 ) The tour is great chance for teachers, teacher trainers, support staff, deployment administrators, and other volunteers to see and discuss best practices from three different schools in Uruguay. May 5 - May 7 is the Summit itself. ( http://ceibaljam.org/?q=edujam2011 ) The summit is a great chance for educators and technical staff to come together to see how they play equally important, yet separate, roles in leveraging advances in technology to provide effective education. May 7 - May is the code sprint (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/EduJAM_Code_Sprint ) The code sprint is a great chance for developers and support staff from deployments, OLPC, Activity Central, and Sugar Labs to meet and work together on specific high priority tasks and long term planning. I look forward to see you all soon. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+
technical discussion snipped Since this is the core point of disagreement within the community, the act of accepting or rejecting the GPLv3 assumes for us the deeper meaning of refusing or endorsing TiVo-ization and DRM in conjunction with Sugar. 'Premature optimization is the root of all evil' -- Donald Knuth The question is: Of the tasks Sugar Labs can do to improve the educational valued of Sugar and collaboration within the ecosystem is tweaking the license among the critical tasks? david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Volunteering to maintain GetBooks
-Original Message- From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel- boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Gonzalo Odiard Sent: lunes, 11 de abril de 2011 10:35 a.m. To: Sugar-dev Devel Cc: Sayamindu Dasgupta Subject: [Sugar-devel] Volunteering to maintain GetBooks Hi, I am working in the GetBooks activity, I have cloned the repository [1] and added features from the activities Get InternetArchive Books and GetBooks Ceibal. I am ready to publish a new version in ASLO, would be great if i can integrate the changes in mainline to enable pootle to translate the new strings. I have requested access to Sayamindu, but did not have response. I think he is very busy now. Regards, Gonzalo +1 One of the biggest challenges with activities maintenance is contacting and engaging existing maintainers. That challenge is inherent to open source projects everywhere. Peoples live and interests change -- they go back to school, they get new jobs, and they start families. One of the fine lines in open source is allocating and reassigning responsibilities and authority between full time developers and part time developers. I hesitate to use the term volunteers because even those who are get paid to work full time on Sugar, deployment developers, OLPC developers, and Activity Central are 'volunteers' from Sugar Labs point of view. So far you, Rafael, and Sebastian are doing a good job finding the balance. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Activities checklist
-Original Message- From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel- boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Gonzalo Odiard Sent: jueves, 07 de abril de 2011 10:50 a.m. To: Walter Bender Cc: Christian Scmidt; Sugar-dev Devel; Gary C Martin Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Activities checklist If we could quickly reach consensus on some outstanding issues regarding standard icons for things like the camera and user-created content, perhaps we could incorporate these icons in all the activities? About icons, I think we need a agreement with: * New items (for example Implode use the star, and the star is our icon for bookmarks) * Save to journal / export (turtle art use the transfer style icons) * View icon (the eye is used for sensors in turtle art, maybe use the sensors icon in Measure?) * Photo / Camera / mic icons * The lips (i am trying to use them for text to speech, but is used in Measure) * User created content (when use the gear?) * A search icon (we use the loupe, but can be confusing with the zoom icons?) The loupe icon was not designed for the toolbar and have a different size Anything more? A nice task would be have a screenshot of every toolbar of all the activities in one wiki page to compare :) Excellent work. It appears that you guys have shifted from a reactive approach (random bug fixing) to a very proactive approach. ( identifying the critical tasks on critical activities ) david Gonzalo regards. -walter Gonzalo [1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Godiard/Activities_for_F14#Activities_test_i n_OS13 [2] http://openetherpad.org/EL5g7TqHEI ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] AC - Update - Dextrose 3 general outline.
To best meet Activity Central's partner and customer needs while aligning with the larger ecosystem, Dextrose 3 will focus _entirely_ on stability and polish. The target release date for Dextrose 3 will be mid December 2011 in preparation for the start of the Australian school year. Upstream - Silbe is merging the Dextrose patch set on Fedora 14 and Sugar 0.92. He anticipates having a working build within two weeks. Dextrose - Anish will be making the release schedule this week - In general Q2 will be settling down after the rebase. Q3 will be initial regression testing to ensure the nothing breaks between Dextrose2 and Dextrose3. Q4 will be exploratory classroom testing with Release candidates. Tincho will go through bugs.sugarlabs.org and update Dextrose and Dextrose 3 tags as necessary. Activities - Rafael and Sebastian will ensure that there are no regressions on activities in the Dextrose Activity Pack between dx2 and dx3. School server - David VA and alsroot will have the initial release of the dextrose server ready. Community - Pablo will coordinate another summit for the 4th quarter of 2011. On the technical side this summit will emphasize connectivity and the role of the school server in the Sugar ecosystem. These are very broad strokes to give a general overview of how Activity Central's work will align with the larger OLPC and Sugar ecosystem. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Design meeting
-Original Message- From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel- boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Gary C Martin Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2011 1:05 PM To: Sugar-dev Devel Cc: Christian Mark Schmidt Subject: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Design meeting Just a heads up that I don't think I can make it for a design meeting tomorrow (Sunday 3rd). I'll read the logs if someone else wants to chair a meeting. If not, hopefully we can try to get through some more agenda items Sunday 10th. As you move forward on design agenda items -- I would like to stress the importance of recognition and credit in the open source ecosystem. This relates to the idea of creating an about icon on every activity. In the current OLPC/Sugar ecosystem there are many individuals and organizations that contribute to the body of work. One interesting example is http://ceibaljam.org/drupal/?q=lista_proyectos the developers are CeibalJam have been working diligently on a number of interesting activities. Giving visible credit to individuals and organization that contribute is crucial to helping those individuals and organizations establish their individual identities and reputations. For example when one purchases a book, the author is prominent. One does not need to look up the book title on a website to learn the identity of the authors. The stance that an about icon adds clutter to the UI is valid. In this instance, the social needs of the ecosystem outweigh the importance of a minimal interface. Looked at from a slightly different angle -- consider the importance the Sugar Labs, OLPC, Fedora, and now Activity Central place in locating their identifying information within Sugar and the resulting software distributions -- it is human nature. Creating an about icon says, We care about you as activity authors and respect your work. David ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] eduJAM! 2011: A Vibrant Summit With A Diverse Range Of Offerings
-Original Message- From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel- boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Organización eduJAM! 2011 Sent: Monday, March 21, 2011 2:05 PM To: i...@lists.sugarlabs.org; sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org Subject: [Sugar-devel] eduJAM! 2011: A Vibrant Summit With A Diverse Range Of Offerings We are very excited to update you with the latest information about the�eduJAM! 2011 http://ceibaljam.org/?q=edujam2011_en �summit. It is great to see that the different pieces of the puzzle are coming together for what will undoubtedly be a landmark for the international community of educational free-software developers. Many of the main developers behind the Sugar platform will be present (Walter Bender, Aleksey Lim (alsroot), and Bernie Innocenti among�others http://ceibaljam.org/node/1108 ). Additionally, people working on different OLPC deployments will be there which guarantees an excellent environment for moving the area of 1-to-1 computing in education projects and related discussions forward. More than anything we aim to make the summit an event to create and amplify relationships in this community. Place The summit will take place at the Universidad del Trabajo del Uruguay (UTU) and more specifically in its brand-new�PAOF building http://ceibaljam.org/node/1171 �which is located in Ciudad Viaja, the historic and commercial heart of Montevideo. Apart from this allowing us to work within a comfortable and versatile space, it also provides opportunities to enjoy this beautiful part of the city during free hours. Program The summit will begin in the afternoon of�Thursday, May 5 with an informal reception aimed at allowing us to get to know each other as well as catch up. On�Friday, May 6 the intensive work begins. This day will be organized in two tracks. In the morning we will focus on a broad vision of the core challenges encountered when designing a software platform aimed at learning in school environments in general and in 1-to-1 scenarios in particular. We can revise and revisit these experiences in light of the experiences made within this context in the past few years. What has and hasn�t worked when it comes to the software? How can we support the creation of effective learning communities? How can we make the development processes in such a diverse and distributed community more efficient? Which applications are we still missing? These are some of the questions which will be on the table. In the afternoon the summit will turn sweet as we fully dedicate it to Sugar. On the one hand we will hold a �Sugar Camp� where will discuss the current state of developments, local labs, the roadmap and how to optimize the work in the community. Simultaneously on Friday afternoon there will be workshops aimed at people such as students and newcomers who want to learn how to develop for Sugar. On�Saturday, May 7 the morning will be focused on the various experiences made in 1-to-1 projects. There will be talks by people working on different deployments, explaining what they have done and discussing the necessities and requirements when it comes to software platform. We consider this to be an important input for planning future work. I would like to make a personal invitation to deployment developers and technical support staff to participate in the events Saturday, Sunday and (if possible) into the next week. On Saturday, Activity Central will create a 'Critical Tasks' list. As we identify critical tasks which are shared across multiply deployments, we will add them to the Dextrose TODO list for our upcoming release and inclusion in the next OLPC OS release. This afternoon will be run in an �unconference� mode. This means that there will be different talks, workshops, and discussion rounds which will be planned and decided upon by the participants on the spot. We thereby hope to learn more about the various ongoing projects, discuss roadmaps as well as form small development and investigation groups. Starting Saturday afternoon Activity Central developers will run a 'Critical Tasks' workshop to help deployments identify and work on their important bugs and feature requests. Through the follow week AC developers will be available to: 1. Help you solve those critical tasks. 2. Help you push those solutions upstream to OLPC and Sugar Labs. 3. Help you identify and coordinate with other deployments and organizations that are facing similar issues. Look forward to see you at eduJAM. david Conozco Uruguay Tour Independent of the summit, a variety of activities will take place in the days leading up to it. These activities are aimed at people who want to explore the experiences Uruguay is making with Plan Ceibal in more depth. They will take place between Saturday, April 30 and Thursday, May 5. Together with RAP Ceibal and OLPC we have developed the
Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Design Team meeting, Sunday 20th 15:00 UTC, #sugar-meeting
Gary et. al. Would you mind replying to initial meeting announcement with a link to the minutes and logs after the meeting is completed. Over the past couple of months several excellent workgroups have emerged who sync up in #sugar-meeting. I would be great to have a quick link to the log flow by the devel mailing list. Thanks for all your design work. david -Original Message- From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel- boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Gary Martin Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2011 9:06 AM To: Sugar Devel Cc: Christian Marc Schmidt Subject: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Design Team meeting, Sunday 20th 15:00 UTC, #sugar-meeting Hi folks, Just a weekly reminder for the Design Team IRC meeting in #sugar-meeting, Sunday 20th March at 15:00 UTC: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Meetings Regards, --Gary ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Tech Report
-Original Message- From: tabitha.m...@gmail.com [mailto:tabitha.m...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Tabitha Roder Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 3:42 AM To: David Farning Cc: Aleksey Lim; sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Tech Report On 13 February 2011 16:31, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On the content side, the New Zealand testers would be perfect fit for editors. Every weekend they could go through the queue of uploaded activities for the week and approve the one without regressions. There would be a strong incentive for people to fix the bugs the NZTesters report in order have their active moved from the sandbox in to public. david We did discuss this a few weeks back and thought we should have some guidelines (these were started on http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Library/Editors/Policy http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Library/Editors/Policy/ ). I liked the idea of us tagging things as passing some basic tests. What is the best way for us to see the queue of uploaded activities? Do you want to add me as an editor and we can have a look at what an editor sees and then come back and ask questions if we need to? I have a login for ASLO site, will I just use that? Yes, I added editor and admin access to your account. You can poke around the entire site. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Tech Report
-Original Message- From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel- boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Chris Leonard Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 7:31 AM To: Walter Bender Cc: sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org; Aleksey Lim Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Tech Report On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:25 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Chris Leonard cjlhomeaddr...@gmail.com wrote: I don't think it is necessarily essential to report current status on every language, that is tracked by the hosting L10n envirnment. I was suggesting something much simpler. Yes/No on POT generated and hosted somewhere (or other L10n equivalent). I may be worth going one step further: since we have such a large Spanish-speaking community, some indication of whether or not there is .es support in ASLO would be nice. Agreed on high importance of lang-es in particular, dirakx has filed a number of ASLO tickets on things like translating descriptions. Then there is the question of localizing ASLO itself (how much gets pulled from upstream, how to localize the diff between AMO strings and ASLO strings, etc.). I think there will be an un-conference part of the summit in UY. Perhaps a translation track/room might work well. Talk about translation needs and how to participate followed by mentored work session to try translating. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Server-devel] Hidden SSID and Proxy settings
-Original Message- From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel- boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Sascha Silbe Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 4:49 AM To: Jerry Vonau Cc: Ardito; sugar-devel; dr.ger...@xo15-sascha.sascha.silbe.org; James Cameron; OLPC Devel Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [Server-devel] Hidden SSID and Proxy settings Excerpts from Jerry Vonau's message of Mon Mar 07 09:51:30 +0100 2011: Yes, think that would be a good idea, with this method connections.cfg can be empty. Perhaps network.py can just use/create the needed file for /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ or make that an option available in control panel. Using system instead of user settings in Sugar has been planned for some time now [1], but I didn't get around to working on it. The first beta of NetworkManager 0.9 has been released [2] a few days ago. As of that version, the distinction between system and user settings is gone for good [3], so it makes more sense to migrate [4] to 0.9 right away instead of moving to system settings first. As part of the 0.9 migration I'd like us to show configured connections in addition to the currently visible access points. This should help users working in less-than-perfect environments (disabled beacons, VPNs, access points on different sites that need different credentials but have the same SSID, etc.). We should also try to move our Ad Hoc auto-connect logic into NetworkManager. Not only would it make our code simpler and easier to debug, but non-Sugar users would benefit from the automatic under the tree networking as well. Even Mac OS X seems to have something similar to automatic Ad Hoc networking + link-local collaboration now (called AirDrop [5]). Have you thought about the resources you need to complete this and when it might land? This is a critical task which is asked for by every deployment. david Sascha [1] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1884 [2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2011- March/msg00020.html [3] http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/ApiSimplify [4] http://projects.gnome.org/NetworkManager/developers/migrating-to-09/ [5] http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/ -- http://sascha.silbe.org/ http://www.infra-silbe.de/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] removing #sugar-newbies
We started it a couple of months ago while testing to see how effectively we could help cs graduates and undergrads with no open source experience become Sugar/OLPC developers. During that period we generated a lot of newbie traffic which was distracting to #sugar. To consolidate communication channels, it now makes sense to remove #sugar-newbies. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Release Notes Was: [ASLO] Release Backup-5
Thanks to everyone that is adding release notes. Short phrase + Fixes SL# is a great help! david -Original Message- From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel- boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Sugar Labs Activities Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2011 8:36 PM To: sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org Subject: [Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Release Backup-5 Activity Homepage: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4326 Sugar Platform: 0.82 - 0.90 Download Now: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/file/27237/backup-5.xo Release notes: * Hide progress bar and show a message when we're finished (SL#2370) * add minimal instructions on main view (SL#2539) * wrap labels if necessary * don't break if statvfs() on a mount point fails * add copy of mimetypes.xml from Restore (SL#2564) Sugar Labs Activities http://activities.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Activity Central Hiring Sugar Activity Developer
Activity Central is hiring one (1) Sugar Activity Developer. The primary responsibility of this developer will be to work with the Activity Central Activities Team to fix bugs and and add new features as requested by Sugar/OLPC deployments. -- About Activity Central -- Activity Central provides service and support plus custom development for Sugar and OLPC deployments by focusing on the Feedback, Fix, Finished product cycle. This position requires the developer to be physically locate near an existing deployment for a minimum of one (1) year before being eligible to work remotely. In lieu of resume please send links to two (2) mailing list threads in which you discussed how to implement a bug fix or feature request and two (2) links to upstream OLPC or Sugar commits you implemented. The Feedback, Fix, Finished product cycle is the process of: 1. Working with the deployment to solicit feedback on software bugs and feature requests. 2. Working with the Dextrose team to prioritize and implement the requested bug fixes and features. 3a. Working with Deployment and Dextrose team to distribute periodic software updates which include the new fixes and features across the deployment. 3b. Working with the upstream Sugar and OLPC developers to merge the requested fixes and features upstream as needed. Please send these links to or additional questions to dfarn...@activitycentral.com david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] [AC UPDATE] The upstream side of Sugar
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 7:22 AM, Sascha Silbe sascha-ml-reply-to-201...@silbe.org wrote: Hi everyone, David has asked me to write a bit about the upstream side of things. Since I'm also going to provide a glimpse about my future plans for Sugar, I'm CC'ing sugar-devel. As a general rule, the more downstream you get, the nearer to the user you are and the more immediate are the problems you're trying to solve. Reverse this and it reads: The more upstream you get, the larger and more diverse the (indirect) user base will be, the more general your solutions need to be and the focus needs to shift to long term development. Or to put it short: Downstream is about tuning for particular users, while upstream is about the Big Picture. Tuning is an excellent metaphor. david This doesn't imply upstream doesn't do any day-to-day tasks and is always slow - the number of bug fixes and minor tweaks that went into Sugar last year is too large for me to count (there were 300 commits total). The last week, culminating in yesterdays Design Team meeting [1], was a nice example of how efficiently we can work together. But as upstream we need to think about long term development. How to adjust to changing user needs and technologies [2] and also ensure that the code doesn't disintegrate into an incoherent mass, but stays understandable and working: maintainable. According to the latest rumours [3], Sugar has a user base of over two million children. Every single bug will likely affect thousands of students. It's unavoidable that this influences our decisions: we want to provide them with an optimal experience so they can learn _by_ using the computer, not learn how to work around bugs and deficiencies. This means we strive for very high code quality - emphasising the maintainability over short term solutions that might improve some part of the Sugar experience. Of course, raising the bar too high for contributors is bad in the long run, too: If it's too hard, people will simply stop contributing. And this hits our most precious resource (on the technology side of the project): developers. Few developers means fewer time spent on fixing bugs, adding features, making Sugar better. I.e.: only minor improvements in experience. Hopefully we are now on a way to avoid at least some of the pitfalls. Dextrose and OLPC are taking up the downstream role and work on the immediate needs of users. They will take care of working with users on their problems and fixing them. That leaves upstream Sugar free to worry a bit less about bugs and focus more on expanding Sugar. Of particular importance is welcoming new contributors and their work (and of course welcoming back some former contributors!). Instead of asking them to improve their patches during many rounds of review, I will now do the fix-ups (including phrasing good commit descriptions - these are more important to the core developers than to occasional contributors). But even working better with contributors is not going to be enough. The number of open tickets is approaching four digits [4]. OLPC is going to work on tablet PCs [5] once the XO-1.75 is finished, rendering the current Sugar interaction design (based on particular characteristics of pointer devices with relative coordinates and more than one button) unusable. What we need is much more developers. More than we can train from scratch (by hiring university alumni) using the available resources. What we need is to tap into the pool of Open Source developers that already exist. We need to take more existing components where possible, focussing on making only the ones ourselves that are clearly insufficient or missing [6] (like the Journal and data store). This leverages the work of the communities around the existing components - in particular the Gnome community. We also need to make Sugar more interesting for developers. Eating our own dog food is the best way to get bugs noticed and fixed fast or even at all. Developers are specialists and require a tool box that is tuned for them in order to be productive. Most of the Sugar developers do their Sugar hacking outside of Sugar because they are more productive that way. If we want them to work inside Sugar, we need to make it adjustable to their needs. We need to allow them to mix match components like the window manager, and to configure Sugar in a way that works best for them. Some might argue that this misses the target user base of Sugar. But I'll argue back that Sugar is not just about low floor (I'm not intending to get rid of that part), but also about no ceiling. Children evolve into adults, users into developers. And with activities like EToys [7], the latter distinction is blurred even today. Thanks to everyone who followed me through to the end. I didn't intend this text to get that long (actually I was more worried about not having enough to write about :) ). Seemed like
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] [DESIGN] Reflect internet connectivity in the 'Network' frame icon
On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 5:38 PM, Michael Stone mich...@laptop.org wrote: On Thu, 10 Feb 2011 at 12:46:18 -0300, Anish Mangal an...@activitycentral.org wrote: Hi, Currently, the 'network' icon on the frame tells us whether we're connected to a network or not. Would it make sense for it to test for internet connectivity and maybe reflect that by displaying a small globe overlaid on the 'Network' icon? Folks, Woot. A good design meeting this morning. Looks like the NZTesters will step up as a.sl.o editors to QA activities before making them available for download. Now Michael jumping in on this thread:) (I've been trying to convince Michael and some of the other original Sugar/OLPC developers to lead a RD team at AC.) As we look at this issues let's remember to focus on our core competencies. 1. Anish, Tch, (Dextrose) are creating something to solve a problem that teachers and formadores are have today. 2. Michael (upstream Sugar developer) has put a lot of though into the original design of the network. 3. Gary (upstream Sugar design)knows UI. 4. Simon and Silbe (sugar maintainers) juggle these needs. you guys rock. david Speaking as someone who has spent a fair bit of time thinking through a few of the narrow technical issues [1], I'd like to gently suggest that we might get better design ideas from our design team if we focused a bit more on the core UI problem before diving into a long thread on the relative merits of HTTP vs. ICMP sensors. Therefore, with this gentle suggestion in mind, what do you all think of the following design thesis: The Sugar UI should make network health discoverable. In particular, is this the core issue? If so, what kinds of affordances does it suggest? If not, then what, in your words, is the core issue? Regards, Michael [1]: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network2/Paper#Self-Test_Algorithm ___ Dextrose mailing list dextr...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/dextrose ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Tech Report
On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 7:21 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@activitycentral.org wrote: This is activities.sugarlabs.org report to cover only technical ASLO aspects. == ASLO maintaining == Actually, we didn't have any explicit workflows except just coding ASLO patch on top of AMO code base, maintaining ASLO servers, and more or less regular approving of new activities by not many people. Nevertheless, it would be useful to have more explicit picture: Technical support, coding and server maintaining (content related changes only by editors request): Aleksey Lim (lead) Content support, ie, ASLO editors: Anish Mangal Bernie Innocenti David Farning Gary Martin Gonzalo Odiard Luke Faraone Pablo Flores Rafael Ortiz (lead) Sascha Silbe Simon Schampijer Thomas Gilliard Walter Bender This is how ASLO staff looks today, technical people by recent changes in ASLO code base and content people is a list of current ASLO editors in the database. Since it is useful to have only one last person to kick, there are leads: Aleksey Lim (coding, server maintaining) Rafael Ortiz (content editors) On the content side, the New Zealand testers would be perfect fit for editors. Every weekend they could go through the queue of uploaded activities for the week and approve the one without regressions. There would be a strong incentive for people to fix the bugs the NZTesters report in order have their active moved from the sandbox in to public. david Organizational. For technical part it is more or less clean, it is the code. For content management, it is not so good. The activity of ASLO editors is low, would be useful to have more editors. So, there is huge amount of work for editors to make ASLO more community/educational oriented. == New Features == 1. Activity version in collections. If version is set for collection activity, only this particular version can be downloaded from collection. 2. Micro-format interface. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/services/micro-format.php?collection_nickname=nick[sugar=version] e.g. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/services/micro-format.php?collection_nickname=gcomprissugar=0.88 * if activity version was not set in collection and sugar request argument wasn't passed, then return recent activity version * if activity version was not set in collection and sugar request argument was passed, then return either recent activity version only for this sugar or nothing * if activity version was set in collection, regardless sugar request argument, exactly this version will be returned == Roadmap == The upstream is in process of switching to new AMO code base, django based (python based framework). We need to do the same. So, the plan is: * Reimplement current ASLO patch to do the exactly the same in new AMO * Add new but not breaking current behaviour: * Upload by one click * Experimental support of bundle-less activities [1] The plan is having new ASLO ready for broad, pre-production testing, until 2011-04-06. === Upload by one click === The only that will be required is just uploading a .xo to the server. All needed metadata will be fetched from the bundle: * activity.info, activity metadata * NEWS, release notes * po/, translation of activity.info fields === Bundle-less activities === Excluding network-less environments, the only thing anyone should know about any activity, to run it from anywhere, is an unique Web url. It is based on 0install[2] project. Network based nature, though, does not mean the it will be useless w/o the net. It will be possible to make selfcontained bundle by packaging activity itself and all its dependencies to one .xo. [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Platform_Team/Doers_environment#Sugar_doers_workflow [2] http://0install.net/goals.html ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Harvesting Sugar Trees.
One of the areas Activity Central is trying to help Sugar Labs and OLPC is by pushing deployment working upstream. The core premis behind open source development is, If the software is useful and the source code is freely available, users will adopt and improve it to meet their needs. We are seeing that happening as individual deployments are taking Sugar and OLPC software and modifying it to meet their individual deployment. The second premise is, If those improvement are pushed upstream they can be included in future versions of the software which benefits everyone. There is a cost to push work upstream. Most deployments have very limited resources and many immediate needs. As a result, the improvements don't receive the attention necessary to push them upstream. Keeping improvements local can provide a competitive advantage. If everyone else is pushing improvements upstream and one deployment keeps their 'special stuff' local that deployment can sell their special version to others. In economic this is called the free rider problem. Neither of these situations is unique to Sugar, OLPC, or educational software. An excellent parallel can be found in the embedded software market. 10 years ago many device manufacturers built their systems on open source software, but kept their work out of tree for one or both of the above reasons. Over time, most embedded system developers have pushed their work upstream. This happened gradually as system developers learned that it was more expensive to maintain their customizations locally then to work with upstream. The tipping point was often found as system developers tried to rebase their customization when upstream rebased. If you are a developer with out of tree patches (MStone comes to mind) or a deployment with local modifications please give us a shout or ping silbe on one of these list. We will try to work with you get your work in tree. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] [PATCH sugar 2/2] Send XO serial numbers with anonymous reports
On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 9:05 AM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@activitycentral.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 04, 2011 at 08:35:03AM -0500, Walter Bender wrote:
It is not clear from this patch if there is a way for a deployment (or
individual) to disable this feature. It is unprecedented that we have
this level of auto-association between user and some arbitrary
authority -- there should be an opt-in policy at the deployment level
and an opt-out policy at the individual level IMHO.
Actually we don't have implicit separtion between upstrem and downstream
gconf configs, except having upstream and downstreamstream git repos.
This feature was implemented entirely only within dextrose (thus mostly
for deployment needs). It needs to be wteaked to make it vlaid for
upstream, ie, broad usage.
In case of sendind s/n w/ anonymous submits, it is request from the
dextrose deployment (local policy permit such things and it might be
useful for deployment).
This is an excellent answer. This is going to be a case where Sugar
Labs and Activity Central can complement each other. Tools like this
are probably not appropriate for Upstream project such as Sugar. They
are required by deployments.
Activity Central can work with specif deployments who require this
type of ability. Activity Central can work the deployment to ensure
that they are following all local regulations.
david
-walter
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 3:29 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote:
---
data/sugar.schemas.in | 11 +++
src/jarabe/model/feedback_collector.py | 10 --
2 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
diff --git a/data/sugar.schemas.in b/data/sugar.schemas.in
index 7e4a923..c3606f2 100644
--- a/data/sugar.schemas.in
+++ b/data/sugar.schemas.in
@@ -24,6 +24,17 @@
/locale
/schema
schema
+ key/schemas/desktop/sugar/feedback/anonymous_with_sn/key
+ applyto/desktop/sugar/feedback/anonymous_with_sn/applyto
+ ownersugar/owner
+ typebool/type
+ defaultfalse/default
+ locale name=C
+ shortAdd XO serial numbers to anonymous submits/short
+ longAdd XO serial numbers to anonymous submits./long
+ /locale
+ /schema
+ schema
key/schemas/desktop/sugar/feedback/server_host/key
applyto/desktop/sugar/feedback/server_host/applyto
ownersugar/owner
diff --git a/src/jarabe/model/feedback_collector.py
b/src/jarabe/model/feedback_collector.py
index c0deae2..4671437 100644
--- a/src/jarabe/model/feedback_collector.py
+++ b/src/jarabe/model/feedback_collector.py
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@ def start(host, port, auto_submit_delay):
_port = port
if auto_submit_delay 0:
- gobject.timeout_add_seconds(auto_submit_delay, _submit)
+ gobject.timeout_add_seconds(auto_submit_delay, anonymous_submit)
def update(bundle_id, report, log_file):
@@ -90,7 +90,13 @@ def submit(message):
def anonymous_submit():
- _submit()
+ from jarabe.journal import misc
+
+ data = {}
+ client = gconf.client_get_default()
+ if client.get_bool('/desktop/sugar/feedback/anonymous_with_sn'):
+ data['serial_number'] = misc.get_xo_serial()
+ _submit(data)
def _submit(data=None):
--
1.7.3.4
___
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dextr...@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/dextrose
--
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
--
Aleksey
___
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http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
___
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http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Hiring Onsite Developers
Activity Central is hiring two (2) onsite Sugar/OLPC developers. The primary responsibility of these developers will be to work onsite at an existing OLPC deployment to improve the local Feedback, Fix, Finished product cycle for the deployment. The Feedback, Fix, Finished product cycle is the process of: 1. Working with the deployment to solicit feedback on software bugs and feature requests. 2. Working with the Dextrose team to prioritize and implement the requested bug fixes and features. 3a. Working with Deployment and Dextrose team to distribute periodic software updates which include the new fixes and features across the deployment. 3b. Working with the upstream Sugar and OLPC developers to merge the requested fixes and features upstream as needed. These positions will require the developer to physically relocate to a deployment for a minimum of one (1) year before being eligible to work remotely. In lieu of resume please send links to two (2) mailing list threads in which you discussed how to implement a bug fix or feature request and two (2) links to upstream OLPC or Sugar commits you implemented. Please send these links to or additional questions to dfarn...@activitycentral.com david My apologies if this was received in duplicate. I am in the process of updating my mailing list subscriptions to reflect my new email address. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Messages notification
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 2:07 AM, Martin Abente martin.abente.lah...@gmail.com wrote: * Why the user should start an activity to know what is happening? Why/when does the user want to know what's happening? Users are busy doing something interesting... We should interrupt/hassle the user never. Or extremely seldom. MartinL I think this is one of the times where we need to agree to disagree. There is a very good chance that this patch set will never make it into Sugar.Main. What you are saying is 100% true from an end users point of view. This patch has a place in Dextrose. Dextrose is looking at the question, How can we provide support staff the necessary information to effectively fix and/or report problems to a higher level of service and support? A pretty typical 'support' staff consists of: Users - Students who fix their own problems. Teachers - Usually have very limited time and technical training - In general, teachers prefer to 'work around' known bug rather than figure out how to report them. Teachers trainers - It is quite common for deployments to have teacher trainers to improve teaching efficacy. In general, teacher trainers are also time constrained because they focus on the educational, rather than technical, implementation issues. Level I Service and Support - It is becoming common for established deployments to outsource level I service and Support to local businesses. This group is also constrained. They often work remotely. There is travel time required to get to a school or class room. Their required skill sets are often very broad; hardware, software, networking. And so it goes until an issue is fixed or is escalated until it reaches the level of someone on sugar-devel. Everyone on sugar-devel is time constrained. They are pull in a hundred direction at any given time. This patch will introduce a cost of user disruption, but hopefully will provide the benefit of increased efficacy of existing service and support channels. This place has a place but that place is probably not sugar.main. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Dextrose Roadmap.
The premise behind Dextrose is that OLPC is a NGO based on economies of scale and Sugar Labs is a community project building a common platform. As such, there is a niche for a team of experts to distribute and support software stacks which meet specific deployment needs. As with any hard project, we have had our share of false starts and dead ends:) As such, communication has not been as clear as it could be. In order to make it easier for upstream projects and deployments to work with Dextrose, I would like to send meeting summaries to sugar-devel, please let me know if it creates too much noise. For Dextrose specific issues there is a mailing list at http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/dextrose . I have attached a project diagram. Flow: 'Feedback' will flow up the stack. Developers will will implement a 'Fix' based on feedback. AC will distribute and support a 'Finished Product' back down the stack. Personnel: AC has hired several full time developers to help facilitate this process. These developers will be augmented by contractors hired for specific tasks. Sugar-Upstream -- Alsroot and Silbe -- As two of the most senior Sugar developers. Alsroot and Silbe focus on upstream development. Dextrose Development -- Martin(tch) is the lead dextrose developer. Martin is responsible for overall dextrose development. Product Manager -- Steven(smparrish) Steven is the product manager. Steven is responsible for coordinating the needs and requests of deployment with available developer resources. Onsite developer -- Anish will be working onsite at ParaguayEduca to ensure that the needs and requests of the deployment are met. AC will spend the next 5 months proving that we can add value to the ecosystem. After we prove value we will implement a business model for sustainability. In general I encourage developers and deployments to interact with AC on the level which is most comfortable. Free end-user download will always be available at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose . We had our first Dextrose Roadmap meeting this morning. Logs are available at http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/2010-11-12 . I hope that AC can become a valuable member of the OLPC/Sugar ecosystem. david attachment: Diagram1.png___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] anonymous ASLO messages
On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero raf...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 09:36:37PM -0500, Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero wrote: Hi all On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 9:15 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 12:18:48PM +1100, James Cameron wrote: On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 12:20:22AM +, Aleksey Lim wrote: On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 10:51:51AM +1100, James Cameron wrote: On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 11:23:46PM +, Aleksey Lim wrote: On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 09:53:18AM +1100, James Cameron wrote: These announcements from activities.sugarlabs.org of new releases are sent without any included identity of the person who did the release. Could activities.sugarlabs.org please be changed to include the releaser in these messages? The problem is that uploaders don't include release notes. The proper fix might be do not accept them (from uploading checks), so patches are welcome :). No, I think you misunderstand. My observation has nothing to do with whether release notes are present in the mail message. Where's the code? http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/slo-activities http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Library/Devel/Installing The file site/app/views/editors/email/aslo/release_en_plain.thtml contains what looks like the release messages, but I cannot see where it is used. What is needed is the authenticated user's e-mail address. But keep in mind that current code is php/cake based and new ASLO will be based on new AMO python/django code. So, would be useful if patch is not invasive and might be applied w/o starting new development/testing/production cycle. That says to me, don't do anything, your effort will be wasted, nobody else cares about this problem. Thanks for the warning. I see no way forward. The thing is, we are using not supported AMO code base that have long standing bugs. Upstream has switched to django and we need to do the same. So, if you was thinking about easy hacking, then you was wrong ;) from AMO's Wiki [1] the migration is not yet complete: ''This project is currently underway, and will take some cycles to complete. Bugs that take too much work to fix will likely be delayed until Zamboni is completed, in order to prevent duplicate work when porting features.'' Zamboni [2] is the code name for the Django project. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/AMO:Editors/InfoEditors [2]http://blog.fligtar.com/2010/01/15/amo-zamboni-planning-underway/ Mozilla uses Zamboni in production https://wiki.mozilla.org/AMO:Developers I was outdated then :(. And Remora page says Remora is no longer maintained https://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Remora I have long running plans about close (but not in launchpad way) integration of SL services, Bazaar + ASLO + ... The first step (during 0.92 release cycle), I'm planing to do, will be switching ASLO to Zamboni (with keeping existed functionality). it sounds like a good plan, great!. To make a long and convoluted story short. Mozilla is using both remora and zamboni in production in kind of a Franken-cluster. By default pages are served by remora. As zamboni is developed, urls are redirected to zamboni. please see https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgX-nlaDaTaBdGhVd3ZlU1ZySWRiNmZ4YmgxTkV6ZlEhl=en#gid=0 for a list of AMO urls. Mozilla recommends that Sugar Labs wait until Zamboni completely meets their needs before starting to move to Zamboni. Maintaining the dual, remora +zamboni, system is not for the faint of heart. They are hoping that most of zamoni will be functional by april of 2011. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Sugar Labs 2010-2011 Election Information
On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Luke Faraone l...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hi all, Sorry for the confusion regarding the 2010-2011 elections. We all could have done a better job promoting it. For that reason, I'm adjusting the election schedule[1] as follows: * 2010-11-01 23:59 EDT: Candidate list closed. (per SLOB motion) * 2010-11-10 23:59 EST: Deadline for applications for membership. Applications after this date will not be processed before the election. * 2010-11-13: All valid 2010-2011 applications processed. * 2010-11-14 17:00 EST: Ballots sent by email, start of voting period. * 2010-11-28 17:00 EST: Voting period ends. I wonder if Luke wrote this email on his industry leading mobile device while attending the 'Rally to Restore Sanity.' [1] david 1. http://www.rallytorestoresanity.com/ david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Moving forward.
Yesterday I sent a rather blunt email on my concerns about the project. It seems the observations resonated with many people while striking several nerves. The volume of private mail or CCed mail (to a subset of the Sugar Labs participants) responses was unexpectedly high. The five main themes of the responses are: 1. Could you possibility be any more abstract? 2. Several of the points are valid. Here are my responses/suggestions. This should be on a public thread, but someone else will have to start it. 3. The core problem is trust. 4. This conversation is like an iceberg, the 'community' only sees 10% and not the other 90%. 5. Dave you are just a jerk, now shut up. For better of worse, all five points are valid. I am a bumbling jerk who is struggling to rebuild community trust without airing anyone's dirty laundry, including my own. To put all of my cards on the table: 1. The ideas driving OLPC and Sugar are sound. 2. Sugar Labs will continue to fragment until the issue of trust is resolved. 3. Because of this, I left Sugar Labs to start a business which provides service and support for Sugar. 4. I need Sugar to succeed. I need OLPC to succeed. 5. I have been trying to operate 'under the radar' because some in Sugar Labs and OLPC have contacted individuals I am working with and 'suggested' that they not work with me. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. I get pissed off about the lack of trust and community building in Sugar Labs, so I go off and form a fork which operates largely in secret. Two years ago, I suggested that the over sight board appoint Walter Bender as Executive Director of Sugar Labs so he would be able to speak on behalf of Sugar Labs. He had three skills which Sugar Labs needed. 1) He was able to clearly and effectively communicate the goals of Sugar and the mission of Sugar Labs. 2) He was able to create an identity for Sugar Labs outside of OLPC. 3) He was a tireless advocate for Sugar. In the past two years Sugar Labs has progressed, largely because of Walter. The goal of sugar and Sugar labs is well understood. Sugar Labs has a clear identity. Now, Sugar Labs has different needs; pragmatic bridge building between individuals and organization. It is time to look for someone with those particular skill to lead/herd Sugar Labs forward. As such I would like to recommend that SLOB ask and appoint Adam Holt as the next Executive Director of Sugar Labs. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] stepping down as maintainer
On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 7:55 AM, Bastien bastien.gue...@wikimedia.fr wrote: Hi David, I think everyone agrees that Tomeu stepping down as a maintainer is a big loss. I join my voice to those who already expressed this and my thanks to Tomeu for all the crazy work he's been achieving here - and it's not only lines of code, it's also a general welcoming and helping attitude, which is priceless. I did a small experiment: I clicked on the Getting involved button. I'm not falling into those categories: developer, designer, educator, content writer. I can help as a translator (I did so in the past) and as a people person. So I clicked on the People person button. I understand the projects listed here and how I can help them: marketing team, documentation team, deployment team, local labs, soas. Here is my list (preference order) : - *Local labs*: I will try to have more people involved in Sugar from France. Since early october, we have at least two new members of OLPC who will work more on Sugar. - *Sugar on a stick*: together with other members, I will try to develop a french Soas. - *Marketing team*: [sadly enough, we don't seem to have news from Sean. Hopefully nothing bad happened to him - he's usually very responsive.] My role here could be a general outreach role: trying to translate marketing documents, speak more about Sugar in events, etc. Bastien, Thank you for all you have done and being the first person to _step_up_ and identify yourself as willing (and from your past performance -- able) to commit to working on a much needed set of tasks. I'm addressing this message to you since your the contact for this role. :) There is something I miss in the list of teams/projects for people persons: community management. This is very different from marketing and outreach. Maybe this project/role could be advertized somewhere on the wiki. I'll keep this list updated about progress I make in this role. PS: I don't dwell on Sugar criticism because I fail to grok how this could help us go ahead and keep moving forward. +1. The focus is not criticism or even discussion. The criticism is a call to action -- Sugar Labs needs help. The focus is the generous response of people like you going though the process of: 1. Determining what can be done to make Sugar and Sugar Labs better. 2. Identifying how you can apply your time and specific talents to those needs. 3. Making the public commitment to work on a few specific needs. david Criticism is useful when resources are growing, not when they are shrinking. -- Bastien ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] [PATCH v5 sugar] Pulsing icon delayed by 5 seconds or so SL#2080
Congratulations -- and welcome to the world of hacking:) This email represents the crux of problem solving. All of the git, python, pep8, variable name, stuff is just syntax and semantics. Important to follow or you get 'errors and warnings':) At it's core 'hacking' is identifying and solving problems. david On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 10:53 AM, Anurag Chowdhury anu...@seeta.in wrote: The present issue has two possible scenarios of solving it 1) Optimise the present pulsing icon animation to reduce the delay : Thats what I have worked towards till now in my patches. 2)Replace the present pulsing icon animation with a better and faster animation: Thats what I think everyone agrees to be the best solution of the issue right now. If we're still taking about the v5 patch that was posted to the list, I don't understand how this change is supposed to fix the bug: + if self._count 2: + self.update() + self._count = self._count + 1 The animation of the pulsing icon is basically constituted by filling the raw svg icon with colours based on a sinusoidal function and it is this sinusoidal filling of the colour that brings about the pulsing effect , so if we dont fill the icon with colour then the icon wont pulse and would render and appear as a raw svg icon only which undoubtedly will take lower system resources to get rendered than the animation. Skipping the first frame of the animation unconditionally is wrong and isn't the same thing of skipping frames dynamically, based on the time elapsed to render the previous frame. I feel like we're trying a number of random tweaks without addressing the root cause of the problem. The first frame of the animation is not being skipped but its just not being filled with colour so as to make the pulsing icon animation start earlier and I hope we both agree on the fact that the delay is caused due to the time taken for the rendering of the zoom in and zoom out animation for the first frame. So if the load of processing the first frame would have been reduced somehow then the animation would start earlier and this approach was confirmed by positive log results upon benchmarking the whole scenario before and after the fix. Perhaps Anurag could work on a fix in team with other Seeta developers? -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ Dextrose mailing list dextr...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/dextrose ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] stepping down as maintainer
On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 11:21 AM, Sascha Silbe sascha-ml-reply-to-201...@silbe.org wrote: Excerpts from David Farning's message of Sun Oct 24 06:42:24 +0200 2010: There is the lack of accountability to stakeholders. I'm not even sure what that phrase means in the context of an Open Source community. Sascha Stakeholder is an English business term which applies to both for-profits and non-profits. A stakeholder is a person, group, organization, who affects or can be affected by an organization's actions. For example: Every contributor - Each individual has an interest in how effectively their contributions in time and talent meet the needs of the target community served by the project. OLPC* - OLPC is the primary distributor of sugar to end users. Deployments, both individually and as a group -- Deployments take the laptops + software and combine it with additional infrastructure, educational resources, and support and distribute it to school. Schools, both individually and collectively -- NZ testers -- Translators -- Researchers -- Universities like RIT -- david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] stepping down as maintainer
On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hi, for personal reasons have to drastically reduce my involvement in the project. Will be leaving maintenance of my modules and unsubscribing from the mailing lists. My place on the board is vacant from now on and I'll be adding to the wiki the new vacancies: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Vacancies Cheers and good luck, Tomeu Sugar Labs lost its lead developer. It is unfortunate that no-one has done a public review of the reasons and implications of Tomeu quiting. Tomeu's leaving is significant enough that Sugar Labs should take a hard look at what is working, what is not working, and how to fix the pieces that are not working. At the risk of angering pretty much everybody Sugar Labs has three fundamental problems. Sugar Labs is optimistic to the point of untruthfulness. Sugar Labs is lead by veto rather than vision. There is a lack of accountability to stakeholders. Sugar Labs is optimistic to the point of untruthfulness. The main _symptom_ of this is the current state of Sugar Labs. Sugar is not perfect. Sugar Labs is not perfect. The _disease_ is an adherence to faulty premises rather then the use of the Scientific Method of: Ask a question. Do background research. Construct a hypothesis. Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. Analyze your data and draw a conclusion. Communicate your results. Premise 1. Sugar is open source, written in python, and the source is easily available. Therefore kids will develop and improve Sugar. What fraction of useful and usable improvements have been committed into sugar by the target users. The key metric is commit ratio. Everyone has an antidote about some budding hacker. As with the patch acceptance process, developing Sugar requires more than solving logic problems. In theory this premise is sound, and desirable, the overall technical capabilities of a nation will improve as more people are exposed to Sugar at an early age. The question become what is the time lag between exposure to Sugar and useful contribution to Sugar? Premise 2. Sugar is open source, written in python, and the source is easily available. Therefore deployments will develop Sugar. What fraction of useful and usable improvements have been committed into sugar by deployments. In theory this premise is sound, and desirable, Sugar deployments and their associated support infrastructure provide a catalyst for building local technical capability. The question becomes, considering the limited resources of deployments, is the benefit of contributing upstream worth the cost? Premise 3. Any problems with Sugar are because the user, teacher, or deployment is not smart or motivated enough. What are the usability concerns of users, teachers, and deployments? How are those concerns being addressed? In theory this is true yet undesirable. A significantly motived person _can_ figure out just about anything. The primary decision making factor for users, teachers, and deployments is marginal benefit. Does using and learning to use the laptop/Sugar prove a marginal benefit over other learning opertunities. Sugar Labs is lead by veto rather than vision. A _symptom_ is the development process. It it easy to have fix commited to Fedora or OLPC. It is hard to have a fix commited to Sugar Labs. When someone sends a useful fix to either OLPC or Fedora, a senior developer takes the patch, review it, fixes it up (if necessary) and thanks the contributor. This provides an incentive and on-ramp for less experienced developers to participate and contribute. Sugar Labs rejects most patches. Once a patch is technically correct, which can take several iterations for a new developer, it is forward to another developer for their vote of approval. The end result is that very few people bother to submitted patches upstream. The _disease_ is a marginalization of anyone who dissents. As a result no one is willing to take a risk. There is an unwritten checklist for participation. 1) Are you a knowledgeable, experienced, and patient open source developer? 2) Is your goal open source advocacy? 3) Are you a strict constructionist? 4) This results in very low participation in Sugar Labs. There is the lack of accountability to stakeholders. The Board of Directors of an non-profit organization the board reports to stakeholders, particularly the local communities which the nonprofit serves. The Executive Director is responible for carrying out the strategic plans and policies as established by the board of directors. As a starting point for bringing Sugar Labs out its current crisis, I suggest the following plan: 1. Each Oversight board member, or candidate, identify a stakeholder and spend the next 12 months advocating for that stakeholder. Advocating includes: Identify the specif needs and goals of the stakeholder. Identify the resources that stakeholder can contribute to Sugar Labs. Identify how
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] [PATCH Paint Activity v3] Added Invert Color Effect to Paint Activity (OLPC #2495)
On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 6:21 PM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: On Wed, 2010-10-20 at 19:59 +0530, Ayush Goyal wrote: @@ -69,10 +69,12 @@ import os import tempfile import math import pango +import numpy Does Paint already use numpy elsewhere? If not, we should try to avoid this dependency, as numpy takes several seconds to load on the XO-1 and also wastes a lot of memory. For a bit of context Sugar is designed to run on low end hardware to keep hardware costs down while extending battery life. There is often a trade off between adding functionality and increasing time and/or space footprint. Thus, anything which increases footprint, 'the cost', must be justified by improving functionality, 'the benefit'. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] Request to review solution for SL #2464
On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Anurag Chowdhury anu...@seeta.in wrote: Gonzalo, I have run the chmod commands as suggested by Gary, and have uploaded Paint xo bundle at http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2464. Kindly review it. Regards, Anurag Very nice post! When I, or developers, quickly sort through the 100s or 1000s of email we get per day. It is very clear what you have done and what step reviewers must take next. I know it sounds weirds but clarity and succinctness are valued over formality and politeness. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] Request to review solution for SL #2371
On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 10:47 AM, Anurag Chowdhury anu...@seeta.in wrote: Team, Wish if you could review documentation in reference to SL #2371 at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose/Resources/Journal-backup. No need to ask for a review. A simple announcement that you have modified or updated the page is enough. It is also helpful to provide a simple (one or two sentence ) description of the changes. Thank you. Appreciate your support. No need to thank or express appreciation mutual respect and appreciation is communicated by the quality of the work and quality of the feedback. Regards, Anurag ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Great Response was Re: [PATCH sugar] Removed hardcoded server url (SL #1976)
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 6:01 AM, Dipankar Patro dipan...@seeta.in wrote:
Thanks for reviewing it, James.
if have_ofw_tree():
sn = read_ofw('mfg-data/SN')
uuid_ = read_ofw('mfg-data/U#')
sn = sn or 'SHF'
uuid_ = uuid_ or '----'
else:
sn = generate_serial_number()
uuid_ = str(uuid.uuid1())
- setting_name = '/desktop/sugar/collaboration/jabber_server'
- jabber_server = client.get_string(setting_name)
- store_identifiers(sn, uuid_, jabber_server)
+
+ setting_name = '/desktop/sugar/collaboration/jabber_server'
+ jabber_server = client.get_string(setting_name)
+ store_identifiers(sn, uuid_, jabber_server)
+
+ if jabber_server:
url = 'http://' + jabber_server + ':8080/'
You are effectively repeating the previous if statement but using the
output ... seems a bit obscure.
^^ Before applying this : The url (url for registration) was set from gconf
only for non-XO devices.
I moved that outside the first if..else you have quoted, so that on all
devices the url is taken from the gconf property
(/desktop/sugar/collaboration/jabber_server)
the second 'if jabber_server:' is put there to check whether the
jabber_server retrieved from the gcnof property is empty or unset. If
jabber_server is a valid one, then change url, other wise keep the url =
initialized one.
I actually went with the above modification due to the chain of mails here :
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-July/025265.html
Regards,
Dipankar
Great response! You clearly explained what you did, _why_ you did it,
and how you came to that decision.
Now a reviewer can effectively make a decision of 'that makes sense,
ACK' or 'what if you look at it this way?'
david
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [Dextrose] [PATCH v5 sugar] Pulsing icon delayed by 5 seconds or so SL#2080
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Anurag Chowdhury anu...@seeta.in wrote: Daniel, Thank you for reviewing the patch. Appreciate it. Wish to inform you that I did try the profiler, and displayed the time slice intervals between rendering of consecutive frames. I did find significant change in the rendering time of first frame. Raw svg icon with colour is timely filled using a sine function, which control its timing, and is updated on every frame of animation. Since, we have a 400 Mhz capacity processor in an XO-1, this has considerable processing lead times associated for completion of the rendering job. My earlier idea of frame dropping is a technique, which can smoothen an already started animation, but does not speed up the start-up. Regards, Anurag Anurag, Based on your background as a game designer you probobly has as much back ground on this particular issue as any one else. Can you create a timer, output the activity start time to the log and report your results back to this list? david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Students looking to contribute
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 12:43 PM, WSU CS401 wsu.cs...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, We are 4 students looking to contribute, this semester, for class credit. We are all senior Computer Science majors at Worcester State College and are eager to get started. We have been researching the Wiki and Python for the past couple of weeks and feel that our time might be best spent contributing to bug fixes on the Activities. So if anyone has or knows of any bugs we can work on, please let us know. Or could some one point us in the right direction so we can get coding. Nice to meet you! Can you tell us a bit more about your background and experience with python, linux, and system programing so we can find appropriate bugs for you? ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] SL Bug #2063
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Mukul Gupta mu...@seeta.in wrote:
Team,
Wish to have your feedback on the design aspect of the ticket 2063 (Sugar
should bring up an alert when an unhandled Python exception occurs) - please
find the git diff attached below. This is an attempt to display an alert
when an unhandled Python exception occurs in the journal. Unfortunately,
when the exception takes place in journalactivity.py , I am neither unable
to notice the Journal Icon (it disappears),
diff --git a/journalactivity.py b/journalactivity.py
index 44cc018..36a2e2e 100644
--- a/journalactivity.py
+++ b/journalactivity.py
@@ -358,8 +358,20 @@ class JournalActivity(Window):
self.show_main_view()
self.search_grab_focus()
+ def uncaught_exception_alert(self):
+ alert = ErrorAlert(title=Operation could not be performed,
msg=Please check the logviewer activity for details )
+ alert.connect('response', self.__alert_response_cb)
+ self.add_alert(alert)
+ alert.show()
+
_journal = None
+def _alert_excepthook(exc_type, exc_value, traceback):
+ logging.exception('Unhandled Python exception: %s', repr((exc_type,
exc_value, traceback)))
+ _journal.uncaught_exception_alert()
+
+sys.excepthook = _alert_excepthook
+
def get_journal():
global _journal
if _journal is None:
--
1.7.0.4
I wish to request you to please review the code and suggest desired changes,
if any.
Moreover, I have two important questions regarding the bug.
1. To catch all unhandled python exceptions in sugar, where exactly should
we be looking forward to be the venue for adding the functionality?
Adding it in journalactivity.py doesn't seem to serve all purposes. It
has to be added somewhere which is being used all the time.
2. Wish if you could recommend on the GUI feature that could be used for
displaying the alert message to the user.
Looking forward to for your valuable suggestions,
Regards,
Mukul Gupta
Mukual,
Well asked question.
1. You followed the 'show me the code' principle. That shows that you
have thought through the problem far enough for a draft
implementation.
2. You are asking for specif help on two specif areas. Based on the
draft code and specifc questions, it is easy for a reviewer to give
you the help.
david
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 24, Issue 36 9Re: how to ask a question)
On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Sebastian Silva sebast...@somosazucar.org wrote: I've been thinking of proposing a questionanswer forum (maybe a sugarlabs-branded shapado or similar instance (http://gitorious.org/shapado). This way we can have a user-supported (and a support-team) multi language forum similar to http://shapado.com/ or http://stackoverflow.com/ This way perhaps we could complement the support gang. I agree the user experience for a mailing list is not optimal for simple questions. I offer to build/mantain it. Would be cool if others were interested in helping out. What do you think? Could Sugar Labs host it? Cheers, This sounds like something that is useful to Sugar Labs and the Sugar/OLPC ecosystem in gerneral. I will help you set it up and provide staff to generate initial momentum. It would be easy for Sugar Labs to host it. A couple of months ago we (Activity Central) set up a new IRC channel #sugar-newbies which is staffed by alsroot. Alsroot is available to help new developers. Answering IRC questions for AC allows alsroot to earn enough money that he can focus his time and energy on his primary project. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 24, Issue 36 9Re: how to ask a question)
On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Yioryos Asprobounitis mavrot...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Sat, 10/9/10, David Farning dfarn...@gmail.com wrote: From: David Farning dfarn...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 24, Issue 36 9Re: how to ask a question) To: Sebastian Silva sebast...@somosazucar.org Cc: Yioryos Asprobounitis mavrot...@yahoo.com, sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com A couple of months ago we (Activity Central) set up a new IRC channel #sugar-newbies which is staffed by alsroot. Alsroot is available to help new developers. But IRC although a valuable avenue for certain things, directly contradicts the views expressed earlier about the value of answering in public vs private. No? And yet it is used a lot :-\ Sorry I was not arguing against the importance of private conversation. From my experience at Sugar Labs and Activity Central -- private help is expensive. It is time consuming for volunteers and costly for staffed help lines. +1 to any one willing set up something like this Adam Holt created a pretty amazing support gang. Until Sugar Labs can get the volunteers or one of the companies in the sugar/olpc ecosystem can pay to staff help lines, I will try to support three options: 1. Improving communication on sugar-devel by emphasize how to ask a question. I did not touch the issue of what is a good question. Just how to ask a question in a way which is more likely to get a good answer. For full disclosure. I am paying several of the 'new developers' participating on sugar-devel. My primary goal is _not_ to reduce the load on the people answering the questions. My goal is to help new developer become more productive, more quickly. 'Asking questions well' will improve new developer productivity because they are more likely to get an answer. All core developers are volunteers who are much more likely to answer questions that are asked well. 2. Improving IRC. #sugar-newbie is logged while #sugar is not logged. Both have advantages. Sugar tends to have cryptic messages... as tends to happen when people work together for long periods of time. Watching a discussion between cjb and tomue makes me think of people playing chess by email. Sugar-newbie tends to be a bit more conversational. 3. Incubating a forum. Based solely on personal experience I find when I google for an answer to a question, 25% of the time I get a forum discussion as a result. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Schedule after Sugar 0.90.0 is released --- or After the game is before the game
On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 2:38 AM, Simon Schampijer si...@schampijer.de wrote: On 10/06/2010 04:54 PM, Simon Schampijer wrote: === Testing 0.90 === So far we have not seen much testing of 0.90 yet, that is why the bug fix releases noted above are so important to us. We need as well your help to actually discover the bugs! There are basically three ways how you can test as of today (besides using sugar-jhbuild): * Install Fedora 14 on a machine and install the Sugar desktop * Test using Sugar on a stick: Get one of the nightly snapshots [4] and put it on a usb key. You can find instructions about it at [5]. It is good to subscribe to the Soas mailing list (low traffic) [6] for announcement and discussions in that case. * If you have an XO (XO-1 or XO-1.5) you can use an image from [7]. If you are aware of any other distribution where Sugar 0.90 can be tested easily please comment. Ubuntu Sugar Remix is being released in about three days. Releasing USR with sugar .90 required us to coordinate too many moving pieces. I expect that .90 will be available on Debian within two week (thanks Jonas). We will then sync the Debian packages to Ubuntu Maverick (they will be available in a ppa) a week or so later (thanks Seeta). david In some cases there are new rpms for Sugar 0.90 that are not in a build yet and you want to verify if those fix an issue, you can do the following: - download the new rpm and put it on a usb-key. - insert that usb-key in an XO - open a terminal and to become user root type: su - then update the rpm with the following command: rpm -U sugar-0.90.2-1.fc14.noarch.rpm Note: You have to add the path to the file on the usb-key to the command from above. Usually the path is something like /media/[random characters]/sugar-0.90.2-1.fc14.noarch.rpm Sugar is a noarch rpm [1] for sugar-toolkit you have to pick the i686 rpm [2]. - then restart Sugar Regards, Simon [1] sugar: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=199034 [2] sugar-toolkit: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=199033 ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] how to ask a question -- was Re: Ticket no #2210 words don't changed when language is changed
On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 20:08, David Farning dfarn...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 1:54 AM, Ishan Bansal is...@seeta.in wrote: Hi I am working on the ticket http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2210. To solve the above bug i am thinking of clearing the text in the text to be translate box when ever the language to be translated is being changed. Please provide suggestion on any better approach to deal with this bug. Over the last month this list has seen a significant increase in requests for pointers. Asking questions is an healthy part of learning, but asking for 'pointers' is _not_ going to be particularly helpful. It shifts the effort to the person answering the question rather then the person asking the question. Effectively asking questions is an art. Asking question is so important that Eric Raymond, author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, has written and maintained an article about how to ask questions the smart way at http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html . I strongly suggest reading the article. The time spent learning how to ask questions the smart way... and asking questions the smart way will pay for itself very quickly. Questions asked the smart way will generally get quicker responses and better answers. Two additional points -- If you are new to the list please clearly describe 1) What you know, 2) What you don't know, 3) and what you think you have to learn to solve your problem. This provides the person answering the question a sense of scope. This is very well put, lately I have felt like I would need to explain most I know about software engineering in order to give an useful reply. And if anyone feels dumb expressing what they don't know. Please note that I just committed one of the biggest mistakes in mailing list manners:( I hijacked this thread without reseting the subject.We all make mistakes and we all get peer reviewed. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Sugar on Fedora and Sugar on a Stick QA Processes Announcement
On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 3:50 AM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: Hi All, As some of you know I was at FUDCon Zurich last weekend. I took the opportunity to sit down with Adam Williamson who is in charge of the Fedora QA team and process to discuss how we could incorporate Sugar and SoaS testing into the QA process. Adam agreed that we would be able to incorporate Sugar into the Desktop QA which will expand our testing massively as Fedora has a great QA team. It will also have the ability to allow us to block a release if there is things broken. That is a double edged sword as if its broken we'll also need to pull out all stops to ensure it is fixed as well, but overall I believe that is positive! In the short term this won't affect this release too much but I will be spending some time to define the criteria for Alpha, Beta and Final releases. It will also mean we have official spins for each of the Alpha, Beta as well as the usual Final releases. While we will see the start of the benefits for the home run this will really start to kick in for the SoaSv5 release process. Overall I think this is a massively positive opportunity for Sugar as it opens it out more to the wider Fedora community and allows us to get involved in the Fedora QA more and define what is important for us for our releases and allows us to ride on the coattails and gain the benefit of the awesome work that Adam and his team are doing upstream. That is excellent news. That will make my life much easier as I work to get Ubuntu Sugar Remix approved as a official Ubuntu release. We are targeting the 11.04 release for inclusion. I hope we can contribute as much back to the ecosystem as the SoaS has contributed:) I am hoping to start by engaging the ubuntu translation community. david ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
