[sugar] [IAEP] Developing activities.

[Morgan Collett]

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 09:57, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
> Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 6:05 PM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>>> 1.  Create Sugar-devel at sugarlabs.org mailing list.  We have discussed
>>> this a few time over the last few months.  Now that we are getting
>>> distro (other the OLPC) related comments the time seems right

+1

>>> 2. Create Activities-devel at sugarlabs.org mailing list.  This will focus
>>> on activity developer related issues.
>>
>> Are there strong reasons to separate the two lists? (Morgan seem to be
>> making a different recommendation).
>>
>> Marco
>
> Yeah it is only meant as a way to notify the activity authors. An
> announcement list:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Morgs/Activities_survey/Recommendations#Mailing_Lists
>
> All the rest of the discussion is going to the sugar-ml.
>
> Best,
>    Simon
>
> PS: some will argue that you can use headers for that as well - but from
> morgan's survey I think we saw that this was the best way to go.

My original proposal was to have a list dedicated to activity
development. There was a lot of feedback on that suggesting that we
should continue to use the sugar list for development discussion so as
not to fragment the community.

What I got out of the survey is that we need a way for activity
developers to unsubscribe from the high-traffic lists but still get
relevant notifications. A high percentage of these developers don't
have the time to keep up with the daily traffic about the platform,
but are missing the information that they need. For example, I'm not
confident of reaching them all (including those that didn't answer the
survey) with the survey results unless I mail them individually.

Therefore I think a devel-announce at l.sugarlabs.o list (which we used
briefly at the start of the Sugar 0.82 cycle) is more relevant to them
than an activities-specific list. It could also be used for packagers
who only want to see major announcements (e.g. 0.82.1 released) and
not the development discussion traffic.

I have just noticed that there is a new devel-announce at l.laptop.o
list, which must be new and unannounced since it's had precisely one
mail to it: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2008-August/thread.html

I do think we need it to be a sugarlabs list because the activity
developers need to keep up with the Sugar platform more than the OLPC
distro platform (with the exception of Rainbow I guess).

What I want to get to now is finality on what I can go back to the
activity authors and advise them. Remember that we have activity
developers who are not using git hosting, who don't have XOs, and may
only be using jhbuild or distro packages to develop and test their
activities.

I suggest:
* subscribe to devel at l.laptop.o and use  to request git hosting on
dev.laptop.org and discuss XO-specific issues (optional for activity
developers)
* subscribe to sugar-devel at l.sugarlabs.o to discuss the sugar platform
development and activity development (recommended)
* subscribe to devel-announce at l.sugarlabs.o to receive notifications
of the things I listed at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Morgs/Activities_survey/Recommendations#Mailing_Lists
(essential)

Regards
Morgan