[Sugar-devel] File Share Activity

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Justin,

On 12 Dec 2009, at 16:17, Justin Lewis wrote:

> I am not the author of Bundle.  If people would like to test it, fine by me.  This was written mainly to get some sort of file transfer system on the olpc.  Another reason is on the 84, it seems you have to pick a file and send it to a specific user, where this system lets you pick files and then send them to anyone who has joined.

+1!

Being able to publish a number of items for download is a very useful feature (imagine a teacher sharing several resources for a specific class lesson). Thanks for stepping up to do this. There has been talk on Journal at some future point providing something similar, but to be honest a really clean/simple/robust activity would be better, why? 

1). Journal could be kept clean and simple instead of trying to overload it with multiple types of sharing features (technically possible, but the design will just get more and more unusable until it looks like a Microsoft office product).

2). As a separate activity it can be developed out side of the Sucrose development/release cycle and team.

3) As a separate activity it can be used by folks not running the latest and greatest version of Sugar (think a generation of hundreds of thousands of kids who use 0.82, and perhaps only ever will).

> I have not had much testing with it yet so if they would like to test it, that would be great.  I still have a few things I need to work on, but any feedback would be great.

I'll try and give it some testing, I might have some UI/design type feedback as well if that's OK with you? ;-)

Couple of quick questions:

- Is it possible to create your git repository on http://git.sugarlabs.org/ or is it already somewhere public? 

- You named your bundle FileShare-2009-12-11.xo, I'd just go with FileShare-1.xo to stick with current convention, and start bumping up the version integer for each new release from now on (that way Sugar will happily upgrade a previous version correctly).

Thanks again for having a go at tackling this one!

Regards,
--Gary

P.S. I think Tomeu mentioned the Bundle activity (I never saw it correctly working when I tested), as there could be a workflow where basically a zip of a bunch of Journal entries could be created by an Activity, and then transferred in one go as a single compressed file (or perhaps in chunks like a torrent). Your File Share activity could potentially subsume this workflow, or do something similar i.e. could provide "Download All" as the primary button that would trigger a downloading of a single zip of everything; then have little download buttons next to each file if folks want to get just a few (and avoid the need for users to have to select file rows and click on a separate download button). Sorry just rambling, only looked at your screen shot so far ;-)