[Sugar-devel] my plans for 0.88

[Tomeu Vizoso]

Hi,

as you may know, the Sugar code is officially maintained by a few
people, even though the code base is quite big.

This has improved recently with Aleksey taking maintenance of the
datastore and the journal, but still I think that ideally each module
should be maintained by one or two different people. The present
accumulation of functions is affecting adversely the quality of our
work, as there are lots of important tasks that are slipping through
our fingers.

In the longer term, I think we'll see deployers of Sugar devoting
their resources to these tasks, but this is still at least one or two
releases away. It's important that we reach that point because there's
a limit to how us volunteers can know what is best for deployers and
users.

For now, I think we should accept that people far away from
deployments are going to be leading the development of Sugar and we
should plan accordingly. Meaning by this that we should make extra
efforts in making sure that whatever changes are done to Sugar, or
features added, they are a win for our users and not a loss. Also, I
think that by closely relating the work that needs to be done with
needs in the field, we can better ask for help and get more volunteers
involved in Sugar development.

People at OLPC have shown interest in working with us so we get the
best feedback possible, so I think we have good chances of getting
very good feedback, though it might take a few iterations to build the
best possible relationships with those deployers.

So in the immediate term I'm going to work on a very simple
questionnaire that will gather a first insight on what is going well,
what is going bad, which opportunities for improvement are, etc. from
each deployment, and then finding a way to present this information to
developers. I know this is not all the feedback that is wanted from
deployments, but we need to start with something and I think that by
showing clearly that we care about their needs we'll be able to build
more complex relationships in the future.

I will be proposing a Google Spreadsheet form in the next few days
that deployments will fill if they choose to. I think we'll need to
have one for OLPC deployments and another for the other deployments
because in some cases those filling up the form won't be able to
easily differentiate between hardware and software issues.

Regards,

Tomeu

-- 
«Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
Farning