[IAEP] Library content, the largest future group of contributors

[Morgan Collett]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 20:09, C.W. Holeman II
<cwhii_cplo at julianlocals.com> wrote:
> Here are some comments on the Sugar Camp Brainstorm session.
> Sugarcamp (http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp_proposal) had a link to:
>
> http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mchua/proposals#Sugarcamp_brainstorm
>
>> SugarLabs the easiest open education/educational technology
>> community for people (especially new volunteers) to contribute to.
>
> That is good and needed goal.
>
> My experience in trying to simply take my existing content
> (http://emle.sf.net) and package it as a library content bundle
> indicates to me that it is not easy for a new outsider to contribute.
> Emle works on Firefox.
>
> I installed Sugar on Ubuntu and tried Emle on the Sugar Browse activity
> which worked. Then I packaged Emle according to the documentation
> on the OLPC and Sugar Labs sites. The problem came when I tried to
> test my packaging.
>
> The issues for new outsiders:
>
> - There is documentation and notes that assume an XO machine vs Sugar
> running on an Ubuntu system.
> - What is supposed to be the same and what is expected to be different?
> - Hardware issues one could assume.
> - The opening page on XO is "OLPC Library" vs "about:blank" on Ubuntu.
> - Was the opening page a bug or an improperly installed Sugar?

It's a bug, although not a trivial one: Sugar should provide a
homepage which is customizable for distributions. It's logged as a bug
in Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sugar-web-activity/+bug/295110
and a bug in Sugar: http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1

> - Where does one ask these questions?

Anywhere where you think you might find someone who knows more about
Sugar than you do... this list worked, as would
sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org, sugar at lists.laptop.org,
ubuntu-sugarteam at lists.ubuntu.com and various others...

> - Where are the pointers to the proper bug tracking system?

If you are using official Ubuntu packages please log a bug against
Ubuntu, in https://launchpad.net. Contact me off-list if you need
assistance doing this. The Ubuntu Sugar packagers will log it against
the "upstream" project, Sugar, in the http://dev.sugarlabs.org
bugtracker if appropriate, and attempt to apply any available fixes to
the version packaged in Ubuntu (or the version in the next release of
Ubuntu if it's not high enough in priority).

> - Where is the documentation that tells one how to determine version
>  information.

On Ubuntu, see your package manager (e.g. Synaptic) for the version of
the sugar package.

> - This is a rapidly changing system.
> - There is a lack of clear documentation on naming conventions.
> - Where is the documentation that identifies what specifications are
>  trying to be implemented in a specific runtime version of sugar.

See the release notes, for example
http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Release/Releases/Sucrose/0.82

> - The multi-platform (XO, Ubuntu, Windows emulation) nature adds complexity.

Yes, but you generally only need to know where to interact with your
platform's people.

> - Adding library collections will likely be the area for which the most
>  outside contributions will be made (vs Activities, Sugar core code or
>  Linux drivers).
> - This mass of library collection contributors will not need to have
>  an XO machine to create new content nor to modify existing
>  content.

I hope we can make library content easy to produce, distribute and find.

Regards
Morgan