[Sugar-devel] new journal and datastore maintainer

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Martin,

FWIW, your three major points were fixed way back by Tomeu's 0.84 data- 
store re-write to make for robustness. Actually I'm fairly sure it was  
these kind'a reports that prompted Tomeu to make that fine effort.  
Prior to this (0.82) I had seen occasional datastore 'loss', sometime  
recoverable, sometimes not (while stress testing 3 XOs here). But  
since 0.84 I've not seen any failures.

I guess we're waiting on the OLPC timeline for an official XO signed  
release with 0.84, before deployments would be comfortable moving  
forward with the solution. 0.84 is just about 6 months old now, so  
happy half Birthday! :-)

On 17 Sep 2009, at 10:37, Martin Langhoff wrote:

> 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.

Fixed in 0.84

> 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

Fixed in 0.84

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

Fixed in 0.84

> 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.

+1!

Regards,
--Gary

> 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
> - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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