[Dextrose] Fwd: Dextrose 2 patches report
Bernie Innocenti
bernie at codewiz.org
Thu Dec 8 22:38:26 EST 2011
Let's cross-post this merge plan on sugar-devel, where it can be
discussed with the the upstream Sugar developers.
For those not subscribed to both lists, there was a short thread here:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/dextrose/2011-December/001476.html
There's nothing inherently wrong if some Dextrose patches can never be
upstreamed for one reason or another. For downstream distributors it's
normal practice to carry around a *reasonable* delta. This can happen
for various reasons, including product differentiation and customer
support.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Sascha Silbe <sascha-ml-reply-to-2011-4 at silbe.org>
To: dextrose <dextrose at lists.sugarlabs.org>
Subject: [Dextrose] Dextrose 2 patches report
Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:23:06 +0100
Hello everyone,
this is the list of Dextrose 2 patches that we still apply to the Sugar
packages in Dextrose 3 (i.e. that have been neither successfully
upstreamed nor dropped):
== sugar-artwork ==
1. Add icons for memory and cpu resource indicator (Anish Mangal)
Part of the Memory / CPU resource indicator feature, see the
corresponding sugar patch below.
2. accessibility_0001_contrast.patch (unknown author)
Part of the "accessibility" features developed by Plan Ceibal; see
the corresponding sugar-toolkit and sugar patches below.
3. accessibility_0002_virtualkeyboard_icon.patch (unknown author)
Ditto.
4. Add device feedback icon (Martin Abente)
Part of the "Feedback" feature; see corresponding sugar patches
below.
== sugar-toolkit ==
1. RFC: Kill the delayed menus for good (Bernie Innocenti, Michael Stone)
This has been discussed upstream for endless hours (see e.g. [1,2],
but no consensus was reached.
2. Add support for using high-contrast GTK Sugar theme (Plan Ceibal)
Part of the "accessibility" features developed by Plan Ceibal. I
still don't know what the actual goals were. Testing of this
particular change showed a negative impact on contrast, the exact
opposite of what I'd expect it to do.
3. STK non-intrusive NamingAlert (Martin Abente)
The Naming Alert has been discussed for endless hours as well.
Upstream doesn't want to remove it before there's a reasonable
substitute. Progress on the latter is being made [3,4], but hasn't
landed yet.
4. Parse activity dependencies (Aleksey Lim)
Submitted upstream [5], stalled.
5. Report to the shell on errors (Aleksey Lim)
Part of the "Feedback" feature; see corresponding sugar patches.
6. Clipboard menu off screen #2201 (Aleksey Lim)
Submitted upstream [6,7], stalled.
7. More robust handling of unhandled exceptions (Aleksey Lim)
Not sure what the reason for this change is. Aleksey?
== sugar ==
1. Add cpu and memory resource indicator to frame (Anish Mangal)
Another patch that has been discussed for several cycles upstream
(especially in Design Team meetings), but with no consensus reached.
2. set-default-scaling-to-100.patch (unknown author)
Hack to set the scaling to 100; not suitable for upstreaming. See
SL#39 [8]. The real fix for this would need to take angular size into
account [9,10]. Maybe we could come up with a good enough heuristic
by analysing the physical screen size. Since it's just a heuristic
the user needs to be able to override it in the Control Panel. GTK3
is supposed to provide better scaling support (the 72/100
distinction currently in Sugar is a hack), so probably not going to
move forward for this release cycle.
3. Add font dpi schema (Jorge Saldivar)
Supposed to be used by sugar-settings-manager [11,12]; can probably
be dropped as even the latest DX2 releases didn't ship
sugar-settings-manager. See also the previous patch.
4. Change the method to add new actitivities in the activities list in
home view (Jorge Saldivar)
Workaround for #1660 [13]; I got stuck on a GTK issue [14] when
trying to fix it the right way.
5. Journal Volumes Backup and Restore (Martin Abente)
6. Journal XS backup and restore (Martin Abente)
7. Processdialog prerequisite check support (Martin Abente)
8. Journal Backup save lease (Martin Abente)
9. backup-translations.patch (unknown author)
Rejected upstream [30,31]. Design discussion still stuck in the Design
Team pipeline [15]. The code needs a lot of cleaning up.
Deployments seem to like the approach because it's integrated into
Sugar, rather than separate activities like Backup / Restore [25,26].
Long-term we should probably move to more transparent School Server
access, similar to the DataManager activity [27]. Unlike Tony [28,29]
I don't want to completely tie Sugar to a School Server, however.
Most individual users and even many schools don't have access to a
School Server.
10. accessibility_0001_cp_accessibility_keyboard.patch (unknown author)
11. accessibility_0002_magnifier_extension.patch (unknown author)
12. accessibility_0003_cp_accessibility_contrast.patch (unknown author)
13. accessibility_0004_cp_accessibility_mouse.patch (unknown author)
14. accessibility_0005_cp_accessibility_capital_letters.patch (unknown
author)
15. accessibility_0006_virtualkeyboard.patch (unknown author)
16. accessibility_0008_cp_show-virtualkeyboard-for-accessibility.patch
(unknown author)
17. accessibility_0007_cp_translations.patch (unknown author)
18. accessibility_0009_cp_show-virtualkeyboard-for-accessibility-traslate.patch
(unknown author)
19. accessibility_0012_add-accel-mouse-default.patch (unknown author)
20. accessibility_0013_add-theme-mouse-default.patch (unknown author)
Part of the "accessibility" features developed by Plan Ceibal. As
mentioned above, I still don't know what the actual goals were.
Before we can upstream this, we need a lot more information from the
original authors. The code needs to be cleaned up; custom packages
are required to make it work in Fedora (and maybe other distros).
I've been tempted more than once to simply drop this patch series,
but have been assured it's important for deployments (without
explaining why - maybe just check-box compliance with
anti-discrimination laws?).
21. Share 3g connection (Martin Abente)
Another (albeit rather useful) wart on the NetworkManager client
code in Sugar. Restricted to sharing 3G internet connections, even
though sharing internet access provided by an Ethernet upstream
connection would be equally useful. The NetworkManager code in Sugar
should probably be cleaned up before trying to fix up and upstream
this patch.
22. Make sure Adhoc is Sugar-Adhoc (unknown author)
I've only recently understood what the purpose of this patch is:
NetworkManager supports several different ways to handle address
allocation and routing for ad-hoc networks. The "default" Sugar
ad-hoc networks (the channel 1 / 6 / 11 icons) use the 'link-local'
method, but for accessing internet via an ad-hoc network created
using the "Share 3g connection" feature we need a different one.
The best thing to do would be to put the wireless interface into
AP mode for sharing, rather than using the ambiguous ad-hoc mode.
Unfortunately, a lot of wireless network drivers, including the
libertas driver as shipped in OLPC and upstream kernels, don't
support AP mode.
We should try to upstream this patch to make Sugar mainline capable
of using a connection created by the (currently) Dextrose-specific
"Share 3g connection" feature.
23. Simple messages notification extension (Martin Abente)
24. Improve message notification behaviour (Martin Abente)
25. Message Notifications second behaviour enhancement (Martin Abente)
Enhancement of the existing notifications support (in the Frame).
Haven't looked at it yet; a first step would be to re-arrange it
into a patch set based on functionality rather than history.
The API changes should be documented and discussed upstream.
There's some additional information at [16].
26. Patch to add feedback icon to frame (Mukesh Gupta)
27. Two kinds of feedback submits (Aleksey Lim)
28. Initial client implementation for feedback feature (Aleksey Lim)
29. Enable/disable personalized and anonymous feedback submits unrelated
(Aleksey Lim)
30. Send XO serial numbers with anonymous reports (Aleksey Lim)
31. Notify on not sent feedbacks; fix issue with not auto resend
(Aleksey Lim)
32. Switch default feedback serve to feedback.sl.o; clean up gconf doc
strings (Aleksey Lim)
33. Do not send empty feedback reports if anonymous_with_sn is enabled
(Aleksey Lim)
This is the "Feedback" / "Problem reports" feature [16]. Haven't
looked at it yet; a first step would be to re-arrange it into a
patch set based on functionality rather than history.
Important aspects like privacy should be discussed upstream.
Also, where's the source for the server side?
34. Yum-updater notifications integration (Aleksey Lim)
Adds custom D-Bus API for interacting with some service that runs
yum. No documentation found. Not upstreamable in its current form.
We should look into how Ubuntu (and possible others) handle this,
especially what interfaces they use and whether we could use them
instead of inventing our own.
35. S non-intrusive NamingAlert (Martin Abente)
See corresponding sugar-toolkit patch.
36. Globalkey for touchpad device icon (Martin Abente)
Keyboard shortcut for switching the touchpad mode on XO-1. I still
think this functionality should move to some system component so it
will work outside of Sugar (e.g. in Gnome) as well.
37. Dextrose: Escape all text passed to Palette.primary_text and
.secondary_text (Sascha Silbe)
Fix-up for several other patches. Should be merged into the
individual patches when upstreaming those.
38. Database support for 3G control panel (Andrés Ambrois)
39. Fix no restart after provider info selection (Martin Abente)
Upstreaming stalled [18-20], probably on our side. Like for "Share
3g connection" it would make sense to defer until the NetworkManager
client code in Sugar got cleaned up.
40. Flickering and unknown icons in the window bar #870 (Aleksey Lim)
Upstreaming stalled [21]; looks like it contains a typo. Somebody
(Aleksey?) should take a closer look and fix it up and / or add a
proper description.
41. Clipboard menu off screen #2201 (Aleksey Lim)
See corresponding sugar-toolkit patch above.
42. Add lease duration information in about my computer (Anish Mangal)
Yet another XO/OLPC-specific feature for the "About my computer"
Control Panel. Makes sense, though, so we should submit it upstream
(Anish?); I will have a few review comments.
43. Extend sugar-launch with more options (Martin Abente)
Rejected upstream [22], but we could start discussions on this
again. Michael has given me quite a bit of food for thought.
44. Show register gconf value (Martin Abente)
ISTR the Design Team had an issue with this (or maybe just with
another "Register" menu item related topic). We should restart
discussions on this.
From a UX perspective, it would be nice if we could automatically
determine whether a School Server is available, rather than always
showing the option and adding a crutch to disable it. There are
privacy issues to consider (that are potentially shared with the
existing code; see e.g. [23]).
45. Let call the frame from arbitrary code avoiding curcular imports
(Aleksey Lim)
Not sure why this one is necessary. We should fix circular imports
by refactoring rather than adding hacks to break the cycle.
46. Replace activity updater with microformat compatible one (Anish
Mangal)
The Dextrose Updater, bringing back micro-format support to the
Update Control Panel. We started to upstream it [23], but the new
version (only submitted on dextrose@, not part of Dextrose 3) needs
a lot of testing first and upstream didn't signal any interest in it
after I posted the patch.
I'm explicitly not listing the patches that we have already upstreamed
since we don't ship those as patches anymore (obviously). They would be
part of a different report that focusses on what we got upstreamed,
rather than what custom patches we still ship.
Sascha
[1] message-id:1255401372.1477.549.camel at giskard
[2] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-October/thread.html#20266
[3] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.96/Feature_List
[4] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Write_to_journal_anytime
[5] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/557/
[6] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/536/
[7] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/534/
[8] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/39
[9] message-id:787b0d920906080335u381f8bcbs790583974a236e95 at mail.gmail.com
[10] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-June/015051.html
[11] http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar-settings-manager
[12] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1692
[13] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1660
[14] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1660#comment:1
[15] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Design_Team/Meetings#Outstanding_topics_raised_for_discussion
[16] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Notification_system_draft
[17] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Problem_Reports
[18] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/129/
[19] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/130/
[20] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/131/
[21] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/870
[22] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/594/
[23] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Server_Kit/sugar-server#Vulnerabilities
[24] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/845/
[25] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4326
[26] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4327
[27] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4208
[28] message-id:4ECC7F22.9080301 at usa.net
[29] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-November/034463.html
[30] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/174/
[31] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/175/
_______________________________________________
Dextrose mailing list
Dextrose at lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/dextrose
--
_ // Bernie Innocenti
\X/ http://codewiz.org
More information about the Dextrose
mailing list