[Sugar-devel] new journal and datastore maintainer

[Martin Langhoff]

Welcome new maintainer!

I am currently doing a bit of work with LatAm deployments, so I do
have some notes related to DS. You may be aware of these issues, of
course.

 - "Dataloss" on startup. We are hearing of some issues in the field
with "dataloss" -- not real dataloss but if there is anything DS
doesn't like something during startup, it renames the datastore
directory, and creates a new one. This preserves the data, which can
be recovered/diagnosed by a DS expert (good); but from the PoV of end
users in the field, the data is "lost" and the diskspace is lost too.

A means to recover "lost" DS entries and diskspace would save a lot of
users' data. And the DS is all about users'  data :-)

Unfortunately for various reasons we are having a hard time getting
samples of those "lost" DSs. Even without them, I am fairly sure we
can make a simple recovery Activity.

 - Better behaviour when naming/renaming files on a USB stick. See
http://www.mail-archive.com/devel@lists.laptop.org/msg19738.html

 - More resilient behaviour when plugging arbitrary USB disks / sticks
(this may be mostly resolved in recent Sugar)

In the field, correct data-preserving behaviour is what matters most.
Even if we had no new features, if we address dataloss scenarios (real
and perceived), users will rejoice. So the above are most important.

There is also some feature work that is interesting:

 - Integration with the Backup on the XS. Tony Anderson's recent work
is a step in teh right direction, but I'd think that it should be a
Journal enhancement rather than a separate activity.

 - Integration with Moodle activities -- so that the Journal keeps
track of documents' association to a particular Moodle-side activity,
and "auto-uploads" to the right place. The recent GSoC project around
printing exercises some of these aspects.

Anyway, -- that's my list, FWIW :-) --

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
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