Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-16 Thread Edward Cherlin
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 20:31, Bryan Berry br...@olenepal.org wrote:
 I strongly agree w/ tomeu on this.
 Making Sugar easier to contribute to isn't anywhere near the top of the list
 of requested features by our kids and teachers in Nepal.
 The far and away most requested feature by teachers in Nepal is a mechanism
 for kids to turn in homework.

Can you set up Moodle instances for them? Do we need Nepali or other
localizations of Moodle?

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Translation#Creating_a_new_language_pack

I see nine Moodle sites listed in Nepal, including several at
Kathmandu University School of Education Distance Program.

There has been talk from time to time about putting a homework
submission capability into Journal. I have no idea how far that idea
has gotten, but I would give it a high priority if I could.

 I am not talking about invasive testing
 here. The typical Nepali teacher just wants to know which students out of
 50-70 kids are failing to understand basic concepts.

Also, Bryan and his team would like to know which are the critical
conceptual and skill blockages for Nepali children so that the team
can create appropriate learning software. I have heard Bryan talk
about one such program that helped children advance several years in
math skill in a few months, catching up in many cases to grade level.

 On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote:

 On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:25, Benjamin M. Schwartz
 bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
  Aleksey Lim wrote:
  So, I have
  strong intension to switching development focus from core team,
  which develops sucrose - glucose(core) and fructose(some core
  activities) to wide range of developers/doers thus some kind of
  decentralization of development process.
 
  I agree. I think this has been a central part of the Sugar design
  philosophy from the beginning.  I think your message is very much on the
  right track.

 While I think this is in the spirit of my vision for Sugar, my
 experience with how Sugar is being used and deployed _today_ makes it
 quite uninteresting and too invasive to consider for the near future.

 The current barriers for people to contribute to Sugar development and
 share their work are mostly cultural. We can make the technology a
 thousand times easier to modify, but if people still think that they
 can be only users, we won't gain anything.

 If we really want more people to realize their power and modify sugar
 and share their work, we need to, in order:

 - show how the community can address some of their needs, as perceived by
 them,

 - show how they can better address the rest of their needs by working
 within the community.

 The rest is just icing on the top, IMHO.

 Regards,

 Tomeu

  [snip]
    * I hope to see many shell forks with implemented features like new
      sugar themes(wallpapers support, new icons etc.), Actions view
      implementations from non-core development/doers. The benefit they
      will have after 0install integration is more useful method to share
      these forks - just a regular entity on Activity Library that brings
      new shell to user environment
 
  I don't think this part will work as a regular entity on Activity
  Library, for security reasons.  Any Activity that hooks so deeply
  into
  the shell is no longer safe to run.  It is running with the full
  authority
  of the user and can violate the user's privacy or interfere with the
  user's actions.  In orders to encourage users to become doers, Sugar is
  designed to make sure that Activities are always safe to run (thanks to
  Bitfrost/Rainbow protections).
 
  I would of course support an effort to wall off parts of the shell in
  a
  secure fashion, but so far almost no work has been done in that
  direction.
 
  --Ben
 
 
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-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-16 Thread Edward Cherlin
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 06:09, Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org wrote:
 On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 06:07 +, Aleksey Lim wrote:
 * as a 3rd party developer, I don't see such teachers requests listed
   somewhere on wiki, that let me see what can I do and peek most
   interesting/suitable-for-my-skils/etc task

 There's enough going around that you could work on which would be a huge
 benefit to deployments. Here are a few ideas.

[3G, bugs, more]

 Documentation: there's very little good documentation on how to deploy
 sugar in a classroom scenario. If you were to start some documentation,
 not only would it be a huge help for deployments, it would also make you
 think more about the real-life challenges which may lead to some
 development projects.

I'm working on documentation of the points where children will not be
able to discover how Sugar works on their own, and how to integrate
demonstrations of those points into lesson plans. See
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_Undiscoverable for an early version
of the list. My family and I are currently preparing to move house
from California to Indiana. After we get settled there, and after the
holidays, I plan to finish a draft of this material and circulate it
for trials and comments.

I would call everybody's attention to the growing movement to replace
printed textbooks with electronic learning materials. Significant
amounts of grant money are becoming available from the US Government,
the Shuttleworth Foundation, Spain, and elsewhere.

[more ideas]
-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-15 Thread Gary C Martin
On 15 Dec 2009, at 13:36, Aleksey Lim wrote:

 On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 10:52:56AM -0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
 On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 04:07, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote:
 On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 10:16:02AM +0545, Bryan Berry wrote:
 I strongly agree w/ tomeu on this.
 
 Making Sugar easier to contribute to isn't anywhere near the top of the 
 list
 of requested features by our kids and teachers in Nepal.
 
 The far and away most requested feature by teachers in Nepal is a mechanism
 for kids to turn in homework. I am not talking about invasive testing
 here. The typical Nepali teacher just wants to know which students out of
 50-70 kids are failing to understand basic concepts.
 
 I absolutely agree with such points, but:
 
 * as a 3rd party developer, I don't see such teachers requests listed
  somewhere on wiki, that let me see what can I do and peek most
  interesting/suitable-for-my-skils/etc task
 
 I'm painfully aware of this situation and have been spending my
 energies on this problem for already a good while. Our colleagues at
 Uruguay and Paraguay are already working on upstreaming their
 developments, but are also going to work with us in identifying the
 most pressing needs in deployments. Have already some ideas about what
 to work on, how do you think we should track them?
 
 Since we have nothing for now, any movements are welcome.
 
 In my mind having wiki page(one page with links to subpages, or category)
 is enough, the major things I'd look for is is having
 priority(deployment schedules etc), summary/description and contacts
 (having irc contact would big plus).
 
 * I'm feeling huge discomfort as a developer when I need to package
  binary blobs to my .xo, w/o instrument which let me unify
  installing/upgrading process of such non-SP/specific-to-my-activity
  dependencies
 
 I agree this is a problem, but also think that many activities
 shipping binaries don't actually need them. Bindings for libraries can
 be written in ctypes, without need to use a .so.
 
 * I'm feeling less(but still big) discomfort as a developer when I
  don't have standard method to share my core related changes,
  for-testing-purposes/to-show-what-I-have-in-mind, well please, attach
  my cloned repos, install them still works but not so attractive for
  users
 
 What about generating a SoaS (or Trisquel, etc) image with such
 changes? This is something that can be done today without so much
 trouble.
 
 * implementing Zero Sugar initiative, in my mind, is providing
  fishing-rod for developers/doers instead of feeding users
  thus has prime priority
 
 I don't see things so black and white. I have been working on this
 same problem for a while now (view source key, extensions, etc) and
 our users are taking advantage of at least the extensions facility. We
 are going to see patches very soon for keybindings, device icons and
 control panel sections. And that code can be already deployed without
 waiting for upstreaming because of the extensions mechanism.
 
 So _today_ we have empowered users that are deploying shell extensions
 without disrupting the rest of the shell, and simultaneously are
 working with the community and sharing the fruit of their work.
 
 The technical part has been in place since a year ago, but the trigger
 for this to happen has been actually social interaction. There's no
 point in making our platform super-hackable if we don't work as well
 in the non-technical part of the problem.
 
 Just to be clear, the technical part of Zero Sugar is
 http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Services
 its not something huge, just a set of declared rules how to work with
 external(to activity or SP) dependencies. Code is ready for first
 release usage and I'm going to spend this week(and looks like next) to
 prepare proper docs/tutorials/infrastructure and remove blobs from all
 ASLO activities.

Woooaaahhh... Removing binary blobs from all ASLO activities!?

Now I'm no fan of having to include a binary blob (I avoid it if I have any 
choice), but Sugar is not targeted at an environment of always on internet 
cloud computing. An activity must be a self contained, sharable bundle for 99% 
of our users, needing no downloads of eternal resources at first run/install. 
I'm most happy to see some smooth fallback mechanism for the 1% running some 
hokey-pokey hardware/software platform, but resources (binary or otherwise) for 
our majority use cases should live inside activity bundles.

Regards,
--Gary

 That's my strong intension and not only as a developer
 but also as a ASLO editor - I think we should stop posting bundled
 binaries to ASLO as soon as possible.

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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-15 Thread Daniel Drake
On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 06:07 +, Aleksey Lim wrote:
 * as a 3rd party developer, I don't see such teachers requests listed
   somewhere on wiki, that let me see what can I do and peek most
   interesting/suitable-for-my-skils/etc task

There's enough going around that you could work on which would be a huge
benefit to deployments. Here are a few ideas.


We know about projects from Paraguay and Uruguay implementing 3G
support. Why not step in early and review their code and send them some
patches?

Look for bug reports from Soas developers and users, and OLPC too. These
people are likely closer to deployments than you are. Here are OLPC
ones: http://dev.laptop.org/report/43 (you'll have to filter the list)
You could perhaps try and put yourself into a role where you address
these needs on an ongoing basis. This would be a dream come true for
deployers and distributors.

Some more project ideas here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org/msg10631.html

Documentation: there's very little good documentation on how to deploy
sugar in a classroom scenario. If you were to start some documentation,
not only would it be a huge help for deployments, it would also make you
think more about the real-life challenges which may lead to some
development projects.

Bryan's point about Sugar not supporting the classroom scenario of
handing work to your teacher is a good one.

Some things that I think would be of large benefit:
Supporting the mass of content that has already been generated:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Content_support

This would help simplify ad-hoc networking:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-December/026831.html

This is a biggie:
http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1608

I suspect this flicker is going to be quite disruptive for field users:
http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1596

F11-for-XO1 work would be of a huge impact to the largest part of
sugar's current userbase. Right now they cannot receive any of the
improvements you make to sugar because the project is not (quite) stable
enough for deployments. It has a buildmaster but not much development
progress apart from the bits that can be directly picked up from OLPC's
XO-1.5 work. We seem to even lack good diagnosis of the outstanding
problems.

You could look at Sayamindu's recent tickets on bugs.sugarlabs.org. We
have identified various places where sugar cannot gracefully deal with
corruption.

I believe there are still various well-known 0.86 regressions (over
0.84). For example, Record not working. These regressions are going to
be a huge headache to anyone who tries to upgrade, perhaps you could
squash a few of those.

OLPC mesh: NM-0.8 now supports this, sugar patch needs to be brushed up
and merged. And help backporting the patches to NM-0.7 would be useful
too.


 * I'm feeling huge discomfort as a developer when I need to package
   binary blobs to my .xo, w/o instrument which let me unify
   installing/upgrading process of such non-SP/specific-to-my-activity
   dependencies

I feel this too. But you can solve it with less drastic changes. Which
you seemed to be doing already.

I've read briefly over your various 0install feature proposals and I've
yet to form an opinion on the technology. I need to read them again, but
at least on my quick reads, I'm still left unaware what the user
experience will be like, nor the developer experience, and what the
inefficiencies of the system will be.

Daniel


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-15 Thread Bert Freudenberg
On 15.12.2009, at 15:09, Daniel Drake wrote:
 
 I believe there are still various well-known 0.86 regressions (over
 0.84). For example, Record not working. These regressions are going to
 be a huge headache to anyone who tries to upgrade, perhaps you could
 squash a few of those.

Speaking of upgrade headaches, the most significant UI change in 0.84 is 
resume-by-default, which combined with the still not implemented versioning is 
possibly unhealthy in deployments. I can see many Journal entries overwritten 
for good. Has there been any experience with kids used to the 0.82 way who 
switched to a later Sugar version? And if needed, would it be easy for 
deployments to revert to not resuming by default?

- Bert -


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-15 Thread Tomeu Vizoso
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:19, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote:
 On 15.12.2009, at 15:09, Daniel Drake wrote:

 I believe there are still various well-known 0.86 regressions (over
 0.84). For example, Record not working. These regressions are going to
 be a huge headache to anyone who tries to upgrade, perhaps you could
 squash a few of those.

 Speaking of upgrade headaches, the most significant UI change in 0.84 is 
 resume-by-default, which combined with the still not implemented versioning 
 is possibly unhealthy in deployments. I can see many Journal entries 
 overwritten for good. Has there been any experience with kids used to the 
 0.82 way who switched to a later Sugar version? And if needed, would it be 
 easy for deployments to revert to not resuming by default?

Good point, reverting would be easy and also adding a setting to
switch it on or off. I can work on it if someone takes the task of
verifying the need.

Regards,

Tomeu


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What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
Farning
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-15 Thread Aleksey Lim
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 02:01:18PM +, Gary C Martin wrote:
 On 15 Dec 2009, at 13:36, Aleksey Lim wrote:
 
  On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 10:52:56AM -0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
  On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 04:07, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote:
  * implementing Zero Sugar initiative, in my mind, is providing
   fishing-rod for developers/doers instead of feeding users
   thus has prime priority
  
  I don't see things so black and white. I have been working on this
  same problem for a while now (view source key, extensions, etc) and
  our users are taking advantage of at least the extensions facility. We
  are going to see patches very soon for keybindings, device icons and
  control panel sections. And that code can be already deployed without
  waiting for upstreaming because of the extensions mechanism.
  
  So _today_ we have empowered users that are deploying shell extensions
  without disrupting the rest of the shell, and simultaneously are
  working with the community and sharing the fruit of their work.
  
  The technical part has been in place since a year ago, but the trigger
  for this to happen has been actually social interaction. There's no
  point in making our platform super-hackable if we don't work as well
  in the non-technical part of the problem.
  
  Just to be clear, the technical part of Zero Sugar is
  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Services
  its not something huge, just a set of declared rules how to work with
  external(to activity or SP) dependencies. Code is ready for first
  release usage and I'm going to spend this week(and looks like next) to
  prepare proper docs/tutorials/infrastructure and remove blobs from all
  ASLO activities.
 
 Woooaaahhh... Removing binary blobs from all ASLO activities!?
 
 Now I'm no fan of having to include a binary blob (I avoid it if I have any 
 choice), but Sugar is not targeted at an environment of always on internet 
 cloud computing. An activity must be a self contained, sharable bundle for 
 99% of our users, needing no downloads of eternal resources at first 
 run/install. I'm most happy to see some smooth fallback mechanism for the 1% 
 running some hokey-pokey hardware/software platform, but resources (binary or 
 otherwise) for our majority use cases should live inside activity bundles.

Well, our major repository is still ASLO

And there is also proposal to support offline mode
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Zero_Install_integration#Support_offline_mode

Having these improvements in shell

* we don't lose one download from ASLO, geting self contained budnle
  just have freedom to disable offline mode when user have internet
  (and getting all benefits like online updates)

* moreover having 0install featires we can minify disavantages of pure
  net access - someone downloaded 100M OOo4kid package can share
  these bytes for other local users(w/o any servers)

So, I don't see disavantages

-- 
Aleksey
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-14 Thread Benjamin M. Schwartz
Aleksey Lim wrote:
 So, I have
 strong intension to switching development focus from core team,
 which develops sucrose - glucose(core) and fructose(some core
 activities) to wide range of developers/doers thus some kind of
 decentralization of development process.

I agree. I think this has been a central part of the Sugar design
philosophy from the beginning.  I think your message is very much on the
right track.

[snip]
   * I hope to see many shell forks with implemented features like new
 sugar themes(wallpapers support, new icons etc.), Actions view
 implementations from non-core development/doers. The benefit they
 will have after 0install integration is more useful method to share
 these forks - just a regular entity on Activity Library that brings
 new shell to user environment

I don't think this part will work as a regular entity on Activity
Library, for security reasons.  Any Activity that hooks so deeply into
the shell is no longer safe to run.  It is running with the full authority
of the user and can violate the user's privacy or interfere with the
user's actions.  In orders to encourage users to become doers, Sugar is
designed to make sure that Activities are always safe to run (thanks to
Bitfrost/Rainbow protections).

I would of course support an effort to wall off parts of the shell in a
secure fashion, but so far almost no work has been done in that direction.

--Ben



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Description: OpenPGP digital signature
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-14 Thread Tomeu Vizoso
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:25, Benjamin M. Schwartz
bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
 Aleksey Lim wrote:
 So, I have
 strong intension to switching development focus from core team,
 which develops sucrose - glucose(core) and fructose(some core
 activities) to wide range of developers/doers thus some kind of
 decentralization of development process.

 I agree. I think this has been a central part of the Sugar design
 philosophy from the beginning.  I think your message is very much on the
 right track.

While I think this is in the spirit of my vision for Sugar, my
experience with how Sugar is being used and deployed _today_ makes it
quite uninteresting and too invasive to consider for the near future.

The current barriers for people to contribute to Sugar development and
share their work are mostly cultural. We can make the technology a
thousand times easier to modify, but if people still think that they
can be only users, we won't gain anything.

If we really want more people to realize their power and modify sugar
and share their work, we need to, in order:

- show how the community can address some of their needs, as perceived by them,

- show how they can better address the rest of their needs by working
within the community.

The rest is just icing on the top, IMHO.

Regards,

Tomeu

 [snip]
   * I hope to see many shell forks with implemented features like new
     sugar themes(wallpapers support, new icons etc.), Actions view
     implementations from non-core development/doers. The benefit they
     will have after 0install integration is more useful method to share
     these forks - just a regular entity on Activity Library that brings
     new shell to user environment

 I don't think this part will work as a regular entity on Activity
 Library, for security reasons.  Any Activity that hooks so deeply into
 the shell is no longer safe to run.  It is running with the full authority
 of the user and can violate the user's privacy or interfere with the
 user's actions.  In orders to encourage users to become doers, Sugar is
 designed to make sure that Activities are always safe to run (thanks to
 Bitfrost/Rainbow protections).

 I would of course support an effort to wall off parts of the shell in a
 secure fashion, but so far almost no work has been done in that direction.

 --Ben


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What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
Farning
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-14 Thread Sebastian Silva
I for one would love to learn a new way to hack on my sugar and easily share
patches.
If we can do better than jhbuild does (user experience wise), I would love
it!

Icarito

2009/12/14 Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org

 On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 17:01, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote:
  On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 04:19:51PM -0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
  On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:25, Benjamin M. Schwartz
  bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
   Aleksey Lim wrote:
   So, I have
   strong intension to switching development focus from core team,
   which develops sucrose - glucose(core) and fructose(some core
   activities) to wide range of developers/doers thus some kind of
   decentralization of development process.
  
   I agree. I think this has been a central part of the Sugar design
   philosophy from the beginning.  I think your message is very much on
 the
   right track.
 
  While I think this is in the spirit of my vision for Sugar, my
  experience with how Sugar is being used and deployed _today_ makes it
  quite uninteresting and too invasive to consider for the near future.
 
  The current barriers for people to contribute to Sugar development and
  share their work are mostly cultural. We can make the technology a
  thousand times easier to modify, but if people still think that they
  can be only users, we won't gain anything.
 
  If we really want more people to realize their power and modify sugar
  and share their work, we need to, in order:
 
  - show how the community can address some of their needs, as perceived
 by them,
 
  - show how they can better address the rest of their needs by working
  within the community.
 
  The rest is just icing on the top, IMHO.
 
  well, thats all true but it doesn't exclude easy to change and easy to
  share possibility of doer's changes e.g. if I want to hack Journal by
  adding wallpaper support(and of course want to expose my changes) the
  worst way that could be is proposing my changes to core team(e.g. think
  about proposing your patches to kernel.org team - maybe exaggerating but
  the same level issue). Having ready to use sugarized 0install
  environment gives developers easy sharing method.

 As I said, I agree with your points of view and also agree something
 should be done in the path you show. But I also think that presently,
 what would bring more users and deployers on board, is by caring of
 their more immediate needs.

 Regards,

 Tomeu

 --
 «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
 What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
 Farning
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Colectivo FuenteLibre
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar

2009-12-14 Thread Aleksey Lim
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 10:16:02AM +0545, Bryan Berry wrote:
 I strongly agree w/ tomeu on this.
 
 Making Sugar easier to contribute to isn't anywhere near the top of the list
 of requested features by our kids and teachers in Nepal.
 
 The far and away most requested feature by teachers in Nepal is a mechanism
 for kids to turn in homework. I am not talking about invasive testing
 here. The typical Nepali teacher just wants to know which students out of
 50-70 kids are failing to understand basic concepts.

I absolutely agree with such points, but:

* as a 3rd party developer, I don't see such teachers requests listed
  somewhere on wiki, that let me see what can I do and peek most
  interesting/suitable-for-my-skils/etc task

* I'm feeling huge discomfort as a developer when I need to package
  binary blobs to my .xo, w/o instrument which let me unify
  installing/upgrading process of such non-SP/specific-to-my-activity
  dependencies

* I'm feeling less(but still big) discomfort as a developer when I
  don't have standard method to share my core related changes,
  for-testing-purposes/to-show-what-I-have-in-mind, well please, attach
  my cloned repos, install them still works but not so attractive for
  users

* implementing Zero Sugar initiative, in my mind, is providing
  fishing-rod for developers/doers instead of feeding users
  thus has prime priority

 On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote:
 
  On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:25, Benjamin M. Schwartz
  bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
   Aleksey Lim wrote:
   So, I have
   strong intension to switching development focus from core team,
   which develops sucrose - glucose(core) and fructose(some core
   activities) to wide range of developers/doers thus some kind of
   decentralization of development process.
  
   I agree. I think this has been a central part of the Sugar design
   philosophy from the beginning.  I think your message is very much on the
   right track.
 
  While I think this is in the spirit of my vision for Sugar, my
  experience with how Sugar is being used and deployed _today_ makes it
  quite uninteresting and too invasive to consider for the near future.
 
  The current barriers for people to contribute to Sugar development and
  share their work are mostly cultural. We can make the technology a
  thousand times easier to modify, but if people still think that they
  can be only users, we won't gain anything.
 
  If we really want more people to realize their power and modify sugar
  and share their work, we need to, in order:
 
  - show how the community can address some of their needs, as perceived by
  them,
 
  - show how they can better address the rest of their needs by working
  within the community.
 
  The rest is just icing on the top, IMHO.
 
  Regards,
 
  Tomeu
 
   [snip]
 * I hope to see many shell forks with implemented features like new
   sugar themes(wallpapers support, new icons etc.), Actions view
   implementations from non-core development/doers. The benefit they
   will have after 0install integration is more useful method to share
   these forks - just a regular entity on Activity Library that brings
   new shell to user environment
  
   I don't think this part will work as a regular entity on Activity
   Library, for security reasons.  Any Activity that hooks so deeply into
   the shell is no longer safe to run.  It is running with the full
  authority
   of the user and can violate the user's privacy or interfere with the
   user's actions.  In orders to encourage users to become doers, Sugar is
   designed to make sure that Activities are always safe to run (thanks to
   Bitfrost/Rainbow protections).
  
   I would of course support an effort to wall off parts of the shell in a
   secure fashion, but so far almost no work has been done in that
  direction.
  
   --Ben
  
  
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  «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
  What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
  Farning
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-- 
Aleksey
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