[sugar] 0.84 goals

[Greg Smith]

Hi Marco et al,

This is very helpful work on planning the next release. A few high level 
process-like comments from me for starters.

1 - I think we need more time. I believe that I saw somewhere that we 
want to finalize the choice of target features by 9/7. I wont have time 
to devote to 9.1 (that's t he relevant release on XO, right?) for 
another week or two. I suggest that we give it until end of September at 
the earliest before we lock down the target features.

2 - Can you integrate this goal/feature set in to the 9.1 page 
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0)? That page will still be raw for 
another few weeks but it may be stable enough to tie this work in to it. 
You can just create a sugar section in the "Priorities_from_Engineering" 
  or filter these in to the appropriate sections or edit the sections as 
needed.

3 - Can we pick a trac convention for following this work? Maybe 
milestone 9.1 and keyword sugar0.84 or whatever works for you so we can 
easily query this.

4 - Can we pick a target deployment and create use cases? I also need to 
figure out which specs or requirements definitions to review. Also, I 
saw one reference to a spec but it looked like a chunk of code when I 
followed the link.

5 - Can we write up some strategic goals? I like the list but I think it 
would help to tie it in to a strategy, maybe even an learning strategy. 
Here is one possibility strategy explanation:
- Make Sugar/XO more reliable so that it does what the user expects more 
often and reduce the number of crashes and hard failures.
- Make it easier for kids to share their work with each other. This 
includes real time sharing and passing of data from XO to XO. Also 
includes allow more kids to collaborate at the same time.
- Make it easier to build activities for the XO

Those are the ones that jump out at me from your list. One which I don't 
see is to improve and extend the sharing paradigm. In that vein I need 
to respond to an old thread with Eben on the work flow to have may kids 
go off, write something at home then come together and merge it in to a 
single shared document. There are also suggestions for having many 
people collect data  (e.g. water temperature) and then integrate that in 
to a shared data analysis application. I'm sure there are other ideas. 
Perhaps we should brainstorm and start at the most general and then pick 
the high level themes. Then we refine them in to more and more specific 
definitions until we get a set of specific features to implement. Could 
be that happened already and I missed it. Even in that case we should 
write up something on strategy so we know where your list fits in the 
grander scheme of things.

6 - What about the datastore? Is that not your area? What about 
activities? You may want to make a scrub through the 9.1 page and flag 
anything which you think is in your space. If you have time wait two 
weeks before doing that and I will try to improve the 9.1 page soon.

Those are my top suggestions at this stage. I appreciate that you are 
moving the ball forward. I hope to catch up in a few weeks.

We only get one or at most two chances a year to build something really 
new. Hopefully this release will be one of those chances. Let's take a 
little extra time now and try to make a break through.

Thanks,

Greg S

******************
Hello,

I started working on the goals for 0.84 in the wiki:

http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84#Goals

Here is what I have so far.

* Next generation journal
* File sharing
* Collaboration scalability
* Responsive UI
* Stable activities API
* Official Sugar LiveCD
* Compatibility with desktop applications
* Quality and reliability

Each of them points to a separate page in the wiki. I'll be working on
several of these pages in the next weeks, writing down requirements,
designs and thoughts about resourcing. Help wanted!

As you can see the scope is very large. The plan is to narrow down each
item to more concrete action items and then probably punt some of the
high level goals. But I really want to get a bunch of stuff done this
cycle!!!

I know it's very vague for now. But if something is obvious missing
please let me know or edit directly.

Thanks,
Marco