[SoaS] Sugar Creation Kit review for inclusion in SoaS

[Thomas C Gilliard]

Peter;

When you have time.

List what would work as a feature of soas and I will attempt to tailor 
it to those items...
(your first review e-mail gives me some starting points)

I will be working on web page ...

Cordially;

Tom Gilliard

Peter Robinson wrote:
> Thomas,
>
> I'm going to add further to this but read this email. Point 3 is the
> major point. Daniel Drake has been involved in more deployments than I
> think everyone else combined so is I believe the BEST person to make a
> judgement.
>
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2010-May/010956.html
>
>   
>> 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.)
>>     
>
> No it wouldn't but your missing some of my points. I will back fill.
>
>   
>> *I would volunteer to attempt to keep them current. Is there not a delta
>> function to update only the changed portions of a file?
>>     
>
> Yes, but that's a very large engineering issue.
>
>   
>> *I have some ideas/possible answers to your concerns, listed below, on how
>> to possibly make the SDK a Soas "feature"
>>     
>
> I want to make parts of it a "feature", parts of the things it is
> trying to address are already planned to be fixed in SoaS v4.
>
>   
>> * The other Feature request  of a custom Browse screen for Soas may
>> achieve similar results for connected users.
>>     
>
> Agreed.
>
>   
>> 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)
>>     
>
> So a v3 is basically just SoaS. What's the difference? In my opinion a
> CD is too big still.
>
>   
>>> * 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.
>>     
>
> So the smaller subset you make can then be reviewed and included in
> SoaS after feature review and we're on the same page :-)
>
> My points here are as follows but first see also Daniel's email quoted above:
> - If there's to be activities included in SoaS they will be in SoaS
> not as a separate tarball.
> - We can't QA them all
> - We don't want to include every bit of crap just for the sake of it.
> We want a selection of good Activities that show case Sugar. We don't
> want 20 memory games and 4 ebook readers. We want 1 of each that work
> well.
> - We are going to include more Activities in v4. Each one will go
> through the Feature process and be accepted.
>
>   
>> *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)
>>     
>
> But this won't work in a tarball full of Activities. Hence the reason
> that we don't provide that and people can go to ASLO and get the extra
> ones THEY want.
>
>   
>>> * 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)
>>     
>
> NO!! Its completely missing the point behind SoaS.
>
>   
>>> - 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.
>>>       
>
> A couple of other points I meant to make in the original email.
>
> Sugar on a Stick isn't designed to be ready and to contain all the
> stuff required for a deployment. Its just not possible to contain what
> a class from sub Saharan Africa, a Argentinian class of 6 year olds
> and a class in Boston of 10 year olds will need. It is designed to
> highlight the features such as collaboration for Teachers, Students
> and as a test case for deployments. Deployments will _ALWAYS_
> customise it to include what they need whether that be a sub section
> of wikipedia in Spanish, or specific school related classroom
> textbooks for Paraguay as a result of this there is no point in trying
> to aim to fit every deployment as we will only miss the mark
> completely.
>
> As I mentioned in my previous mail there are a lot of good "Features"
> in your proposal. What I need you to do is rather than submitting it
> as "One big feature" is to break it down into a number of smaller
> features so that each individual feature can be reviewed based on each
> individual merit. You've already started this with the Bookmarks
> feature we discussed last night.
>
> The other thing you need to realise is that everything needs to be
> contained 'within' the SoaS .iso. So by definition the SoaS .iso can't
> be inside itself. That is a chicken and egg problem :-)
>
> So a quick look through the list of stuff in your text file [1] I get
> these features to give you an idea:
> - Change to the default book marks in Browse
> - Inclusion of local FLOSS manuals (pdfs)
> - Increased selection of Activities (Feature for each)
> - Alternate installation methods (Feature for each) - One note here is
> that we need to keep it simple and we need a commitment for support.
> - dejadup / duplicity inclusion
> - Partition editor
> - Text editor (what's wrong with Write BTW?)
> - Inclusion of other References
> - SugarClone
>
> And with that list of features above we basically get SCK (yea, its
> likely i've missed some but you get the point) so I'm not rejecting
> SCK I'm asking you to break it down into bite size chunks (Features)
> rather than expecting me to eat a cow in a single bite :-)
>
> Peter
>
>   
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