[Sugar-devel] Introduction and question about introducing Sugar development

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Fri, 2009-06-26 at 12:53 +1000, Steve Dalton wrote:
> Just went on IRC channel - but no-one around - so I'll try here.

The #sugar channel is usually very active.

This weekend, most Sugar Labbers are in Berlin for the LinuxTag &
FUDCon, and anyway it was night in Europe and US when you posted this.


> Steve Dalton here from Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. I'm an
> experienced developer - mainly C/C++/Java/Groovy - but also dabble
> with Ruby/Python, just starting out playing with Sugar development

As you learn your way through Sugar, please let us know what was hard to
discover or unclear in our documentation, development process or code.

We need to find out what makes it hard for newcomers to get started to
lower the bar as much as possible.  We go around saying that young kids
will one day become contributors, so there's a lot of work to do in this
area.

If sugar-jhbuild defeats you, try my "streamlined" clone.  I believe it
makes things faster and easier, but it's been tested lightly on distros
other than Fedora 11.


> I was kindly donated 5 XOs a while back and I have been trying to get
> a bit of a local OLPC developers group started here in QLD. Have young
> kids and my (almost) 4 year old is already getting stuck into Sugar
> and working things out which makes me think you guys are onto
> something really awesome - I'd love to help in some way.

Also let us know what parts of the UI work well and which ones don't for
kids that young.


> Anyway - one way I think I might be able to stimulate some local
> activity is by doing some sort of live demo on developing with Sugar.
> I was hoping to demo something at Barcamp Brisbane next month and
> possibly something at the OSDC (Open Source Developers Conference) in
> Brisbane later this year if it works. I have made one of my paper
> submission for OSDC a Sugar one but It's sitting in my drafts folder
> until I can be sure I have something that has half a chance of working
> out (I like jumping in at the deep-end but don't want to make a
> complete fool of myself).


Are you aware of the OLPC friends local community in Oz?

 http://www.olpcfriends.org/


My good friend Joel Stanley from Adelaide (also on this list) was
planning to start a Local Lab some time ago.  You should get in contact
with him as well.


> Does anyone have any good suggestions on what to do? I've done the
> Hello world demo and had a look at some of the activities already
> developed... but was hoping to do something a little more interesting
> with some "cool" value to get people interested. Are there any canned
> demos or tutorials around that anyone can recommend? Might give me
> some ideas.

Many others can give you better advice than me on the current status of
development, but my feeling is that we need to involve more people on
enhancing existing activities rather than start new ones.

>From your skill profile, you seem suitable for working on Browse, which
is xulrunner C++ code wrapped in a Python UI.  Caution: it's non-trivial
code, certainly not recommended for beginners.

Since you have pre-school kids, you might want to work on enhancing
Speak.  It's currently unmaintained, but very simple and cool IMHO...
Wouldn't it be awesome if someone grew it into a Speak & Spell activity?


> Many thanks in advance

Thanks to *you* for helping!

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/