[Sugar-devel] A small request.

[Gary C Martin]

On 2 Feb 2009, at 22:30, Martin Langhoff wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Gary C Martin  
> <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
>> pull it back on list), but while trying to follow this thread I'd  
>> been
>> assuming one of the XS functions is as an http proxy cache server  
>> (squid or
>> some such). This wouth then help reduce common internet traffic via  
>> caching;
>> one person downloads new version of TurtleArt, it's sitting in  
>> cache for the
>> rest of the class/school.
>
> Oh, yes it does have an http proxy (and yours is a good question).

Oh fab, it's nice not to ask a dumb question, from time to time :-)

> However, think about an XS that has no internet connection or an
> incredibly bad internet connection. The regional "sysadmin" team will
> have made sure that the XS has all the relevant activities (supplied
> at install time, or or via a USB stick). Those activities are not in
> their "canonical place"... they actually are at
> http://schoolserver/activities/
>
> So we have 2 options
>
> 1 - the activity updater on the client side tries
> http://schoolserver/activities *first* before trying other urls

I like option 1, if that's any help.  With my Activity developer hat  
on; I personally avoided the activity.info option, I didn't notice any  
other activities pick this up at the time and thought it would be a  
poorly tested code path. From the wiki notes it seemed to be there as  
a kinda fig leaf to give the activity author some tighter release  
control (i.e prevents some 3rd party from easily modifying the public  
wiki/mini format incase they stage something bad). In your remote XS  
use case, those 3rd parties end up being the deployment teams.

Worth a quick look to see how many activities are actually using  
this... Quick look at an XO with misc ~45 activities... I see 9 using  
update_urls, but 6 of them (Analyze, Measure, Pippy, Record,  
TurtleArt, TurtleArtPortfolio) for some reason I can't quite decide on  
have chosen to point at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/G1G1, I  
guess overriding the update group a deployment may actually want to  
stick with. The other 3 (Calculate, Chat, Etoys) point else where (2  
using dev.laptop.org home directories and etoys using etoys.laptop.org/ 
xo).

Regards,
--Gary

> 2 - it goes directly to the "correct" url, and we hope that the XS
> knows all the relevant "correct" urls (activities have their "update
> url" in their metadata)
>
> If you count on activities coming from a limited number of sources,
> maybe the XS can know them all. But if we succeed and there are a
> million activity authors out there, the 'cheatsheet' approach breaks
> down.
>
> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
> -- 
> martin.langhoff at gmail.com
> martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
> - ask interesting questions
> - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
> - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff