[Sugar-devel] new journal and datastore maintainer

[Aleksey Lim]

Hi all,

Sorry for not being in the thread,
its 0.86 release time..

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 11:37:04AM +0200, 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.
> 
> 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.

That should be disappeared in 0.84 after Tomeu's work.

>  - 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)

Not sure about 0.82 but in 0.84/0.86 datastore doesn't work with
non-ds sources, its a shell level task.

> 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.

Yeah, I think Tomeu's 0.84 ds is more reliable in that case.

> 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.

Could you provide any links?

>  - 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.

That could be very useful and not only in case of Moodle but in common,
"remote" Journal entries from another users, ASLO activities, global
sharing on library.sugarlabs.org(I hope we'll manage to do this in 0.88
cycle).. but thats, in my mind, not ds job(which could be simple if
follows only local-data scheme). I'm personally going to tackle this
field in 0.88 release cycle.

-- 
Aleksey