[sugar] Sugar Digest 2008-06-24

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Latest Sucrose: The new Sucrose 0.81.3 Development Release is now
available. The release has some new features, including: Manual
reordering of the Home view icons; a freeform layout of the Home view
icons; improved feedback on activity startup; support for custom
certificates in Browse; alt+tab activity switching; etc. We are now in
feature freeze, so the short-term focus will be on testing, bug
triaging and fixes. The community has done a great job in that we
achieved practically all the features that we had targeted. Thanks to
everyone that made this possible and special kudos to the Sugar
release team.

Detailed release notes can be found in the wiki (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.3); a
sugar-jhbuild branch for the release can be found here
(http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=sugar-jhbuild;a=shortlog;h=sucrose-0.81.3).

With the release of 0.81.3 we will be in feature freeze
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam#Feature_freeze): this
affects all of the modules included in the release. To request an
exception, which will be exceptional, please send mail to sugar at
laptop.org, copying release-team at sugarlabs.org; please include the
patches you would like to land. For string changes please also copy
localization at lists.laptop.org.

2. Making the installation of Activities easier: Dave Farning is
working on a web interface to managing activities based upon Mozilla's
AMO codebase (addons.mozilla.org). He has successfully used AMO on a
local server to install activities on an XO-1 laptop and to install
Sugar on a conventional laptop. He has started submitting a series of
patches upstream to Mozilla.org with the goal that SugarLabs will be
able to use the AMO codebase as maintained by Moxilla. A few areas
that require work: (a) Look and feel ? applying the sugarlabs
stylesheets; (b) Applications ? currently, AMO hardcodes application
data rather than handled dynamically; (c)  Addontypes ? AMO can handle
several addontypes such as extension, plugins, and and dictionaries,
but they are not yet handled dynamically. By modularizing how AMO
handles applications and add-on types, we should be able to drop in
Sugar application  and and addontype code.

The work flow for a developer would be:
* Activity authors register their activity with AMO;
* author uploads latest release into sandbox;
* reviewer verifies new upload works correctly and publishes the upload.