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Peter;<br>
<br>
When you have time. <br>
<br>
List what would work as a feature of soas and I will attempt to tailor
it to those items...<br>
(your first review e-mail gives me some starting points)<br>
<br>
I will be working on web page ...<br>
<br>
Cordially;<br>
<br>
Tom Gilliard<br>
<br>
Peter Robinson wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTimQuJ4pSnQIw4DVGB0Jz2Bgc-2aZ3qE-jYcRMi2@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2010-May/010956.html">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2010-May/010956.html</a>
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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.)
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
No it wouldn't but your missing some of my points. I will back fill.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">*I would volunteer to attempt to keep them current. Is there not a delta
function to update only the changed portions of a file?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
Yes, but that's a very large engineering issue.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">*I have some ideas/possible answers to your concerns, listed below, on how
to possibly make the SDK a Soas "feature"
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
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.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">* The other Feature request of a custom Browse screen for Soas may
achieve similar results for connected users.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
Agreed.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap=""><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Revised_Browse_default-bookmarks.html">http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Revised_Browse_default-bookmarks.html</a>
Cordially;
Tom Gilliard
satellit
Peter Robinson wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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+
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">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)
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
So a v3 is basically just SoaS. What's the difference? In my opinion a
CD is too big still.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">* 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
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">*I can make a smaller subset of ASLOxo that covers Mirabelle Compatible
Applications.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/Activities-Index-Mirabell.ods">http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/Activities-Index-Mirabell.ods</a>
was a first attempt at doing this.
I have been editing the ASLO listings based on this testing.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
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.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">*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)
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
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.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">* 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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">* A series of CD's might cover this -sized for copying to 1-2 GB sticks (see
above)
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
NO!! Its completely missing the point behind SoaS.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">- 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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
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
</pre>
</blockquote>
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