[IAEP] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on convos in other lists

[Peter Robinson]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 4:54 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 10:26 AM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> The problem with this approach is that it renders SoaS ineffective for
>>> new tryers of Sugar (i.e. the overwhelming majority of teachers and
>>> parents we are trying to reach).
>>
>> I don't think it will be any less ineffective than having 20
>> activities of which half have issues, crash or just don't run.
>
> Are people saying _only 6 activities work reliably?_
>
> My question of "which is it?" was assuming there are more than 6 that
> run well, demo well, maintained, etc. So it meant "which plan is it, 6
> activities that allow downloading and installing of more, or the good
> ones?"
>
> If there are only 6 good ones...  would focus on making that list longer.
>
> Did APIs break with Sugar churn, Fedora churn? Developers upload
> without testing? (Rethorical! Flamefest warning! Those questions are
> bound to be a flamefest blaming people who don't deserve to be
> blamed... :-( )

I think some of or all of the above are to blame. I'm still trying to
get time to test. I should do so in the next couple of weeks. Record
is one of the classic ones with issues. It was broken horribly for
SOAS-2 and possibly even v1 but there's been no real attempt to fix
it. Part of it is also that to be in Fedora the precompiled binary
crud needs to be removed and in a lot of cases Activity developers
don't test it with the native libraries. Also I know Write isn't
currently on the list because it doesn't work properly [1] but
obviously it would be a good one to have as its a great demo of the
collaboration.

We also want to get away from the point where a few people are running
around doing 20 hour days trying to get the release out the door.

I know just prior to to the last release that Sebastian was
re-spinning the release into the early hours of the morning to fix
Activity bugs to get the release out the door on time for marketing
the day before an exam. If people aren't going to spend the time to
make sure their activity works prior to a release there's only only
limited time the main people have to do the testing along with all the
other release process as well as getting on with the rest of their
life. So I think its better we ship with less Activities better tested
that cover the core functionality.

Peter

[1] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1767