Hello,

I'd like to tell some words about our development activities and their
schedule. Now that we are 4 developers, things will likely go faster and
it is better if each one knows what the other ones are doing. Currently
we have 3 main development topics:

* application coding and fixing
* Live system improvement
* ARM port

Gaurav and Kishor are dealing with applications. Gérald is dealing with
the ARM port. I'm mainly dealing with the Live system, although I can
participate a bit into coding, fixing and porting to ARM, when tools
developed for the Live system are concerned.

Applications
============

Recently Gaurav and Kishor have been working on fixing TBO's bug and
finding/developing a tool to set time limits for the use of DDL (no more
than X hours per day, not before xx:xx and not after yy:yy). The next
jobs I can propose is to improve the user interface of DDL. There are
two main topics:

1. Improve LxLauncher interface (icon arrangement, background images,
merge LxPanel into LxLauncher, etc.)

2. Replace the activities menu (currently a tweaked GDM) with a standard
application, possibly deriving from LxLauncher but any other solution is
welcome

The goal is to get an easier and more consistent interface, whatever the
screen size (from smartphones to large TV sets). I'd like these jobs be
achieved for the successor of Gondwana, which should be published by mid
2012. Note that I started to talk with the Debian maintainer of LXDE and
we may manage to work together with the LXDE team on these topics in
order to get our changes integrated upstream.


ARM port
========

The ARM port shows a good progress since Gérald had
Debian/Squeeze/armel/Gnome run on top of a Genesi smartbook (sorry for
the technical terms :) ). Our objective is to get an universal build
process: whatever the support (CD, USB key, ARM rootfs), whatever the
target architecture (x86, ARM, PowerPC, etc.), we should be able to
build DDL with the fewest manual, error prone, operations. We then have
still several huge tasks to achieve:

1. Set up a Debian package build server

2. Move as many tricks as possible from the Live environment to Debian
packages

3. Automate the ARM build of DDL (instead of building Gnome :p)

1 and 3 are mainly for Gérald, 2 is mainly for me. Moreover we also want
to move to Debian/Wheezy/armhf to get better performances. This will
prepare the move of the LiveCD to the next Debian stable release,
Wheezy, although we don't know when we'll be able to start to deal with
Wheezy. Note that Gaurav and Kishor may help porting applications to
ARM, especially their own developments.


Live system
===========

Despite the Live system is correctly working, we are currently facing
several issues:

1. Gondwana is quite obsolete and fails to perfectly work on some recent
hardware

2. our development version is still fat and needs a lot of work to reach
a single CD

3. translations still need work for the development release

For these reasons it seems to me important to bring enough efforts
during the coming 6 months in order to get the successor of Gondwana for
mid 2012 and not later. The priority will be to (automatically) extract
translations from Squeeze packages, merge them with Gondwana
translations then update Transifex resources. Then we'll put the
development release on a strict diet to get it fit 700MB :).

Simultaneously, we'll have to bring efforts to several other topics that
are not as fundamental but still important for the Live system, for
example:

1. be able to merge our work to the official Debian Junior project
2. look for digital contents
3. improve graphic design

But not all of them are of the developer's responsibility ;).


Final words
===========

I don't pretend to have listed all our possible development topics but,
as you can see, we already have quite a lot of work for the coming
months. Of course you're all invited to take part to the development
effort, for example just testing builds or applications is always
appreciated. Any comment or suggestion is welcome.


Cheers,
JM.

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