[Sugar-devel] Volunteer Opportunity

[David Van Assche]

Mor than the hardware or whether its using a wlan/jabber or even mesh
networking, there are serious underlying problems with collaboration itself,
and my belief is they are in the sugar presence module, though I could be
wrong. Under gnome, mission control 5 is responsible for doing presence
stuff, connections with whathever connetion manager is wanted, and initial
chat inititiation or much creation... from there other parts of telepathy
get involved, though in general its just telepathy that does all the stuff,
and from where the dtubes get involved with the sharing, the problems seem
to stop. That is to say, once a connection has been established between one
ore more other parties, the ride is smooth, the connection stays up and the
collaboration is quite fast and reliable... Its what happens before this
that causes many issues... The detecting of shared activities, users,
intitiating connections, etc.

My suggestion was to get rid of sugar presence and go the gnome/kde way and
directly use telepathy's mission control 5, which in my experience works
very well. I've done some initial testing, got some python scripts that do
the creation, detecting of users, creation of local link mucs, etc... and it
all seems to work smoothly, though I've done non of this in the sugar
environment. If you do take this on, I'd be more than happy to help as
telepathy itself fascinates me, and I've studied the dbus bindings
themselves quite extensively. Empathy, which is built on telepathy seems to
work quite flawlessly too, as do many of the chat clients and other apps
used in maemo/neo freerunner/android.... Abiword, inkscape and several gnome
game apps use telepathy without issues too (sudoku and tic tac toe come to
mind) but I'm by no means a python or C guru, and have trouble with exactly
how everything works... A lot of the code seems quite complex and I have
difficulty following it, my own code for stuff being duplication of what
already exists out there, and I'd love to be able to have more knowledge to
be able to do more pure collaboration (All the code involved up to the dtube
stage and then the use of the remote dbus bindings for programs, presumably,
one would have to crate these remote dbus bindings too, another part of all
this I'm unsure about)....

But yeah... for me sugar presence should be migrated to mission control 5
and I'd bet we'd see a lot of problems just dissapear...

kind regards,
David Van Assche

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 2:36 AM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:

> On 6 Nov 2009, at 22:03, Sascha Silbe wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 12:17:32PM -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> >
> >> My experience is that the problems with Collaboration are basic
> >> problems with mesh networking, presumably in hardware, drivers, and
> >> protocols.
> > While I can't (and won't) rule out the local network links (i.e.
> > WLAN in whatever mode), I'm usually connected to a Jabber server
> > using wired networks; still Collaboration doesn't work reliably.
>
> +1
>
> I occasionally run test sessions of 4-6 VM Sugar clients using Salut
> on an internal network (VM simulated, never touching wire/wireless)
> and even basic buddy presence often borks out after ~20min of use. The
> usual fail case is that one client stops seeing all others, but all
> others always pretend to see the missing client (even if it is really
> not there). The only resolution is to reboot all VM clients and hope
> they all can see each other for a while longer.
>
> The often mentioned 'it's poor wireless' may well be an issue in some
> cases, but it's certainly not the main one I see when testing
> collaboration, I dread to think what a class of 30 kids would see if
> collaboration was needed as a core part of a 40min lesson.
> Unfortunately I'm out of my depth on making much head way in pin
> pointing the issues (at one point I even started thinking it was dbus
> intermittently dropping messages).
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
> > CU Sascha
> >
> > --
> > http://sascha.silbe.org/
> >
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