[Sugar-devel] some efforts that would be really useful for deployments

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 9:47 PM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> After revisiting some of the changes I have made to the software while
> working on deployments I just wanted to post the list again as a
> refresher.
>
> I have not had enough time to do the appropriate master-level QA on
> these, or to get them running on the latest Sugar versions. I hope that
> some people will consider taking on these tasks.
>

<...snip>

>
>
> Customizing browse homepage
> The procedure to do this is too complicated for most deployments, and is
> undocumented.
>

Maybe using a GConf key would be easier here ?

> Customizing which activities are in the favourites view by default
> You can do this just by editing a file, but that file is a part of the
> sugar distribution so it will be lost on upgrades.
> There is also no documentation for how to do this, as far as I can see.
>

Again, a GConf key ?

GConf has been used for this sort of customization for deployments (in
fact - a full fledged tool for doing this exists for GNOME, called
Sabayon - http://projects.gnome.org/sabayon/)
We can utilize Sabayon's techniques so that deployments can simply
drop a zipped profile/cutomization file somewhere in the filesystem
which will apply the customizations everytime the user logs in.

<..snip snip>

>
> Another constant headache is with translations. How do you roll out new
> translations for old software? The best we have right now is language
> packs but they install files which conflict with both system packages
> and activity bundles. And they are difficult for deployments because you
> need Linux skills to execute them.
>

For Sugar 0.88, I will be doing an extended gettext as sugar.gettext
which will allow parallel installation of translations (and will get
priority over the translations in the activity directory). In that
way, we may at least ensure that there is a clean way to upgrade
Activity translations.

<..snip snip>

>
>
> And speaking now from a "Sugar implementor" standpoint, here are 2 fully
> specced features which have yet too see much attention:
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Font_configuration

I will be adding a xsettings-manager daemon (yes, yet another daemon)
to sugar 0.88 which should take care of some of the font and other
settings in gconf <-> gtksettings issue. I will also try to identify
any other font specific problems that may be present while working on
this.

I still need to write specs/feature proposals for the above though :-)

Thanks for this - we need more of these from the deployment side.

Cheers,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]