[Sugar-devel] Some possible git patches for Labyrinth-4

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 12:26, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> On 20 Dec 2008, at 20:13, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 04:14, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Tomeu (and other Sugar devs),
>>>
>>> Here's some patches for the Labyrinth-4  work created with:
>>>
>>>      git-format-patch 0d2bf1756d5f05b86a4f35ba8cbdb401b5cdb724
>>>
>>> That covers all the commits I've re-made here to a clone of your
>>> Labyrinth-4
>>> git rep:
>>>
>>>      http://gitorious.org/projects/labyrinth-sugar
>>>
>>> I'm still rough with git, workflow, et al, so shout if I could be making
>>> this easier for folks to work with. All of these patches so far (except
>>> the
>>> SVG icon) are to the upstream labyrinth source code to make it work a
>>> little
>>> better (and prettier) on Sugar. Is there some sort of magical OSS dance
>>> to
>>> waft some of these upstream, or is this effort considered a fork?
>>
>> I guess it's a fork for now, but anyway we should try to reduce the
>> difference as much as possible, ideally just adding some sugar on top
>> of the unchanged upstream sources.
>
> Yea, that was the plan when I started, but there was/is a lot of
> unfinished/odd stuff floating around in the upstream sources.

Yeah, reality is tough sometimes ;)

>> Subject: [PATCH] Added sugar friendly SVG activity icon.
>>
>> Cool!
>>
>> Subject: [PATCH] Allowed delete key event to work on links.
>>
>> Sounds good, should be easily upstreamable.
>>
>> Subject: [PATCH] Enabled curves by default.
>>
>> We should be able to change this without modifying the upstream
>> sources. What about a property in MMArea?
>
> Upstream have a hard code value for this in that odd utility.py file.
> Ideally curves would be a style attribute of a link so you could mix n'
> match them as needed in a mindmap, and have them save/load/shared correctly.
> But at this rate I'm going to be working just upstream, and nothing on
> Sugar.

Yeah, ideally, the Sugar part would be 5-10% of the total code.

>> Subject: [PATCH] Made thought boxes more rounded.
>>
>> Same as above.
>
> Same as above :-)
>
> There's lot's of comment talk in the source that suggests upstream wants
> custom 'themes' so you can switch from one style to another, but almost
> everything is hard coded and scattered about the various source code files
> :-(
>
>> Subject: [PATCH] Make default thought colour white so that gtk
>> selection state is visible.
>>
>> Same.
>
> ...
>
>> Subject: [PATCH] Use users XO colours for the primary thought.
>>
>> Again ;)
>
> ...
>
>> Subject: [PATCH] Removed the fill on the bbox so you can see what
>> you're selecting...
>>
>> Not sure, but may be as well a property that upstream can agree in adding.
>
> Yea... oh well, looks like I'll be working on someone else's, someone
> else's, project for a while then :-(
>
>>> Perhaps I should just post patches to the sugar-dev list, it may nudge
>>> others into action and stop me from bothering Tomeu too much ;-) I guess
>>> I'd
>>> need to be able to push (accepted) patches to Tomeu's git rep, if that's
>>> the
>>> right procedure to aim for.
>>
>> What if you take ownership of the project?
>
> Oooh, sounds like commitment to me... I've registered with gitorious
> (garycmartin) is there some magic you need to do to allow me to git push
> (downstream changes only I guess)?

Why don't you register the project in git.sugarlabs.org and push there
your tree? That can become the "authoritative" tree, from where
releases are made.

>> I will be around whenever
>> you need it, and anyway I won't have much time to keep working on
>> this. I think you may be able to get more people involved in the near
>> future and I have some cool ideas about collaboration support that may
>> interest upstream as well ;)
>
> All the needed upstream work is currently bothering me just at the moment,
> have you contacted them at all yet about the sugar port? Seems a huge amount
> of work up there to do, and a lot of wasted time discussing instead of
> coding. I can only test changes on the XO/Sugar side, and they use
> subversion for their RCS. I did sign up to the (very quiet) mail list last
> week, so I guess I should start that whole 'how to submit patches to them'
> discussion – maybe it'll be easier than I expect.

Haven't contacted them yet, took me a while to have my subscription
request approved and by that time had already moved to other stuff.

> BTW: Just fixed copy, paste and added cut, and that code is all in your
> sugar wrapper :-) Currently working on making a decent behaviour for the
> 'add thought' button you had started.
>
> Rather less excited than before (as I'm more lone coder than cat herder)...

In that case, and given that a mind mapping activity can be very
simple and labyrinth is not very mature, why don't you write it from
zero? If you make the equivalent of MMapArea well abstracted enough,
the labyrinth people may pick up your work and put the gnome UI around
your widget instead, helping us maintain the whole of it.

Also, if we had a proper model (a simple tree would be enough), it
should be quite easy to make it exportable through telepathy, and both
the activity and the gnome app would gain collaboration. That should
attract more users and developers to help with maintenance.

Seriously, modifying the labyrinth code to suit as well our less
trivial needs may be more work than writing a simpler replacement.

Regards,

Tomeu

> Off to find the cats,
> --Gary
>
>> Thanks a lot,
>>
>> Tomeu
>