[sugar] Develop activity (Oops...)
Ryan Pavlik
abiryan
Mon Aug 6 19:03:02 EDT 2007
Jameson "Chema" Quinn wrote:
> Hi, this is Jameson. I'm pretty much available afternoons in Guatemala
> (GMT-6).
>
> I pretty much agree with what Andrew said about i18n of the
> programming language itself, but I have a slightly different point of
> view. I'm interested in doing something that would be as useful as
> possible for internationalization of programming itself, in both
> education and real-life, *across* languages and platforms. I actually
> agree that OLPC and Python is the coolest platform there is, and the
> right place to start this effort - but I hope that whatever we do will
> be generalizable beyond that niche.
>
> I want to get the UI right - just enough magic to do everything you
> want, but not so much that it gets annoying. That means either being
> very intimate with the editor's internal data structures, or being
> very bossy from outside them. Either way, but especially in the latter
> case, I see that when you mix dynamic changes of UI language
> (retranslation or detranslation on the fly), dynamic changes in the
> translation dictionary (at the module level, of course), and undo,
> things start to get complicated. I talked to some of the AbiWord
> developers on IRC about their data structures, and they are
> less-than-effusive about how robust their main text data structure is
> (their file structure is XML, but their data structure does not have
> "end tag" elements for many tags, so they have not been able to unit
> test that all their code respects clean heierarchical structure).
>
> This makes me continue to wonder if AbiWord is the right answer for
> the editor widget for the Develop activity. Andrew has been very clear
> with me that that is a done decision, because it will preserve a
> common UI and allow the new collaboration functions to be used in
> Develop. Still, if it were up to me, I'd like to consider both sides
> of that question. To do this right, we may want something more
> made-to-order - and maybe the collaboration is easier to add than it
> would be to hack AbiWord into the right shape.
<snip>
It may interest you to know that the AbiWord folks are still
concentrating on the AbiWord as a rich-text widget idea - I think Marc
is doing work on it still (he committed a partially-working Develop
plugin some time ago and has been working on AbiWord + Collab stuff for
OLPC since), and we also have a Summer of Code student working on the
libabiword issues. As our Collab wheel has already been
re-invented/refactored, I'd suggest that continued wheel reinvention
might be a misuse of limited resources.
Ryan
(I'm not sure what you mean about issues with our XML - we output
through a standard XML library (libxml2 or expat) and so everything
should be well formed. Lack of unit tests are simply due to lack of
people interested in programming them [high opportunity cost], not from
any technical impossibility, as far as I know. Our DTD is out of date,
but again, that's an opportunity cost issue.)
--
Ryan Pavlik
AbiWord Win32 Platform Maintainer, Art Lead: www.abisource.com
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: www.cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
"Optimism is the father that leads to achievement."
-- Helen Keller
"The folder structure in a modern Linux distribution such as Ubuntu
was largely inspired by the original UNIX foundations that were
created by men with large beards and sensible jumpers."
-- Jono Bacon, The Ubuntu Guide
More information about the Sugar-devel
mailing list