[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-03-02

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest===

We are on the eve of the release of Sugar (Sucrose 0.84). This is the
second major release since Sugar Labs was founded and the community
has shown great discipline in keeping to the release schedule while
simultaneously making great strides in usability and stability. The
complexity of the release process has been compounded by the fact that
we are targeting a much broader base than previously. Not only are we
working with many more GNU/Linux distributions (easily twice as many
as with 0.82), but the LiveCD/LiveUSB distributions are playing a
major role in our outreach strategy—supporting this diversity requires
much more coordination and more testing cycles. As the new release is
pulled into the distributions we'll undoubtedly get feedback about
bugs—we are still too thin on the testing (Bug) team, but nonetheless,
we are on a trajectory towards a much improved product that will reach
many more children in the coming months.

While much of work has been targeting low-level improvements, some
user-facing Sugar (Glucose) highlights include "resume by default",
which makes it much easier to access on-going projects and greatly
reduces clutter in the Journal, and universal "view source", activated
by "Shift-Alt-V". The community has also been busy enhancing Sugar
Activities (Fructose). Old favorites have seen improvements and many
new Activities have been added.

The Localization team has been busy. We have almost complete support
for more than 25 languages and almost 70 active language teams.

The biggest changes in terms of infrastructure are the switch over to
Gitorious for project hosting and the recent addition of
addons.sugarlabs.org. Gitorious makes Sugar truly a distributed
project. No one gates adding new projects or forking of existing
projects. The intelligence is "in the leaves" and now the control is
in the leaves as well. Visit addons.sugarlabs.org if you haven't done
so already. It is modeled after the Mozilla addon site and it is much
more accessible for the user (and efficient for the developer) than
the cumbersome wiki interface</a> we had been using. Further, it is
designed for scale.

We are also on the eve of launching a static website as a series of
landing pages for sugarlabs.org. Christian Schmidt and the Design Team
have worked tireless to built a site that will be much more accessible
to teachers and parents, many of whom have found the wiki to be
impenetrable. Sean Daley and the Marketing Team have been helping fill
in the many holes in the site's content and also turning my
academic-speak into something comprehensible. A highlight of the new
site is a beautiful illustrated narrative
(www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite/index.php?template=page&page=learners)
by graphic artist Dongyun Lee (www.dongyunlee.com). During a heated
feedback process some great ideas for a children-oriented site that
more directly interfaces to Sugar were voiced. Something to aspire to
in the coming months.

Kudos to Simon Schampijer and all the members of the Release Team.,
Sayamindu Dasgupta and the Localization Team, Bernie Innocenti and
Dave Farning and the Infrastructure Team, Christian, Dongyun, Sean,
and all the members of the Design and Marketing Teams, and all the
Activity authors and the various teams at the upstream distributions
who have been helping with packaging, debugging, and feedback.

===Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings===

* I'll be hosting a meeting of the Oversight Board this coming Friday
(2009-03-07) at 14 UTC, 9 EST on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting

* I'll be hosting a meeting of the Education Team this coming Friday
(2009-03-07) at 15 UTC, 10 EST on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting

* Homunq will be hosting a Google Summer of Code meeting on Wednesday
(2009-03-05) at 17 UTC, 12 EST on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting

===Sugar Labs===

Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2009-February-21-27-som.jpg).

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org