[SoaS] [Sugar-devel] Where should we put our mixture of bugs, feature requests and misunderstandings as we develop curriculum

[Gary C Martin]

On 1 Oct 2009, at 01:27, Caroline Meeks wrote:

> As I work with educators to create and write up curriculum we will  
> discover problems.  They will be a mixture of Sugar, Activities,  
> SoaS and confusion.
>
> There are a bunch of ways we could deal with it.
>
> 1. Everything goes into Launchpad soas answers and we sort it out  
> from there.
> 2. Everything is first posted to IAEP, discussed and sorted out and  
> then put into Dev, Launchpad soas or into a wiki page somewhere or  
> just lost in the mailing list archives
> 3. Everyone tells me everything and I try to decide where to put it  
> which has obvious problems
> 4. Everything is put into Trac
>
> For example todays issues
>
> 	• Record is not recording audio - probably hardware SoaS issue.

There will likely be a number of facets to this, without explicitly  
reporting the hardware being tested, version of SoaS, version of  
Record, this report would not be very actionable. It could be a SoaS  
build issue, Fedora HW support, a bug in Record, some Sugar issue, or  
some other unfriendly Activity that has messed with the input  
recording volume.

> 	• Colors journal entries are not showing up as an image so I can't  
> import it into another program like Cartoon Builder.

If I remember correctly, colours uses a custom format because it  
records the creation process stroke by stroke that can be played back  
to learn how a painting was created. There is a toolbar button for  
copy with grabs a regular bitmap image to you clipboard (where you can  
either then 'Keep" it to Journal, or paste it into some other Activity  
that supports image pasting). I think Wade mentioned he was  
considering also an "Export as" type tool button for directly saving a  
bitmap image direct to Journal. Check bugs.laptop.org Colors component  
tickets and create a ticket for your enhancement request. Actually  
just looked, sthere is one already, add a comment to it so the author  
sees you care about it and it might help as a ping reminder ;-)

	http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/577

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> 	• Cartoon builder is cool, I want to make my own characters but it  
> seems really hard in Sugar to draw a bit, save, draw a bit more,  
> save under a new name, how can I do that more easily.

More a list discussion point, but as a really simple workflow:

1) Start new Paint, paint something, stop, name it.
2) Start new Paint, paint something, stop, name it.
3) Start new Paint, paint something, stop, name it.
...
N) Start paint, draw, stop, name it.

A slightly quicker, but currently a REALLY DANGEROUS HABIT would be:

1) Start new Paint
2) Paint something
3) Name it
4) Click "Keep" <---- WARNING this is a new version with same  
activity_id, horrid feature waiting to eat you
5) Goto 2

> 	• I'd like to save a figure out of FlipSticks and put him into  
> cartoon builder. Is there a way to save a flipstick image?

Not that I know of, this would be a new bugs.sugarlabs.org enhancement  
ticket. The closest we have just now would be to take a screen shot.  
Unfortunately we don't have an image 'Crop' tool handy yet. Perhaps an  
ideal feature enhancement request for ImageViewer as 'Crop' is really  
useful to have about.

> How do we capture and track the issues, especially since we know we  
> don't have the resources to solve them all immediately.

Well specific Activity bugs or feature requests should be trac tickets  
in the authors favourite bug tracker (almost all are components in bugs.sugarlabs.org 
). If it's more a random casual inquiry about an Activity I would be  
mailing the author directly (I do this a fair amount of time). With  
more general topics going to the lists for a wider discussion.

I can't say I've got around to using the Launchpad instance, way too  
much to keep on top of already going on in the Sugar Labs trac (and  
lists), but if your segment of folks find it easier to use, there is  
not too much harm done as long as relevant issues get bubbled up by  
someone into the correct locations (i.e. where someone likely to take  
action is watching/looking).

Regards,
--Gary