[SoaS] Sugar Creation Kit review for inclusion in SoaS

[Thomas C Gilliard]

Peter:

 Thanks for your input. I am somewhat at a loss on how to proceed.

*Maybe request Project status, like sugarlabs has granted sdz soas 
project, for the SDK DVD/CD sets.
(this would not get fedora involved directly in supporting it.)
*I would volunteer to attempt to keep them current. Is there not a delta 
function to update only the changed portions of a file?

*I have some ideas/possible answers to your concerns, listed below, on 
how to possibly make the SDK a Soas "feature"

* The other Feature request  of a custom Browse screen for Soas may
achieve similar results for connected users.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Revised_Browse_default-bookmarks.html

Cordially;

Tom Gilliard
satellit

Peter Robinson wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
>
> My initial reaction is "Wow, what a lot of good stuff"! There's a lot
> of stuff in here that is a feature in and of itself but (and there's
> always a but) I feel the SCK as it stands won't become a 'Feature' of
> SoaS. I'll make some bullet points below of my concerns and flesh the
> data below.
>
> * It includes 5 copies of SoaS and related derivatives.
> * It includes 140 Activities
> * It includes a lot of manual work
> * Its MASSIVE! I've seen sizes ranging from 3.2 to 9Gb! We could fit
> like 18 versions of the existing SoaSv3 into that!
> * included documentation
>
> So the fleshing out bit:
> * 5 copies?
> - If we need to ship 5 copies of SoaS we're doing something wrong.
> - We don't ship old copies of SoaS in the latest version. Do you see
> MS or Apple or Fedora doing that? No! Strawberry is no longer
> supported, Blueberry is almost to that state. We don't have the
> resources to deal with that and its a support nightmare. It also says
> that we don't believe the latest version is the best.
> - Size. People want one copy, to do that they don't want to download 5+
>   
Do I want to make a V3 version only?
* A CD is too small, unless there is a series of CD's with an Index
    (maybe covering each directory on the CD)

> * 140 Activities
> - No QA. The reason we cut down the Activities is Mirabelle was the
> ability to provide well tested working Activities. The issue with Read
> proves we had trouble dealing with 10. Doing that with 140+ isn't
> sustainable.
> - There's no guarantee of the license. We only want to ship free ones.
> No flash. No Codecs etc.
> - Binary inclusions. Support issues on the current SoaS release. It
> causes problems and its hard to QA. See point above.
> - Its out of date the moment you ship it
>
>   
*I can make a smaller subset of ASLOxo that covers Mirabelle Compatible 
Applications.
http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/Activities-Index-Mirabell.ods
was a first attempt at doing this.
I have been editing the ASLO listings based on this testing.

*I think ASLO site has to be changed to recognize
what version of sugar is requesting .xo downloads and not permit access 
to those not compatible.
(restricted to password access -experimental)
> * Manual work.
> - We need to automate as much as possible. Manual stuff has 3 main
> issues. 1) error prone especially human 2) time consuming 3) QA.
> - We want to automate more. Fedora has a feature called AutoQA. We
> want to make use of stuff like this.
>
> * Its massive!
> - While the idea is great it generally doesn't work
> - DVDs are horrible and likely to break. This is even worse in the
> developing world where the "Sneaker Net" still applies because the
> conditions are worse. 9Gb keys are still expensive when your in the
> developing world where wages are low.
>   
* A series of CD's might cover this -sized for copying to 1-2 GB sticks 
(see above)
> - It is out of date the moment you create it.
> - Its large amounts of bandwidth, see 5 copies above.
>
> * Included documentation
> - It is out of date the moment you create it.
> - Its static and not dynamic.
> - Its generally wrong and out of date
>
> So that sums up most of my concerns. The main concern is this though
> "Its not one feature its a good dozen of them"
>
> Some of the issues that SCK was made to fix we plan to fix in v4, they
> were know issues and done like that for a reason. In the rest of SCK
> there's a lot of good stuff that should be individual features in and
> of themselves.
>
> I hope that outlines some of my concerns and why as it stands I don't
> believe the SCK can become a "Feature" of SoaS due to it being a super
> set there of.
>
> Peter
>
>