[Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 89

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 01:51, Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 4:29 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 10:17, Elena of Valhalla
>> <elena.valhalla at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 4:51 PM, Jim Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> [...] Fedora 11
>>>> with the included Sugar environment, [...]
>>>> This does not give the child all the advantages of SoaS, but it's
>>>> probably far from useless.
>>>
>>> I wonder how hard would it be to configure such fedora to look for an
>>> USB key with SoaS on it and mount its home partition at login time:
>>> this would help keeping some of the advantages of SoaS (the ability to
>>> work from any computer anywhere while keeping your journal, for one)
>>> with the added convenience of being able to use older hardware.
>>
>> Shouldn't be too hard, this has been proposed in the past but nobody
>> never got to implement it. I think it will be useful in some use
>> cases, including thin clients.
>
> Writing the code/scripts to do this is moderately easy.  IF the
> version of the base OS and Sugar on the stick is identical to the one
> on the hard drive.  Anything else is a potential headache.  For
> example:
>
> Sugar has already gone through at least one  journal format change
> which was not compatible.  I think the journal format was auto
> upgraded the first time you ran the new software.  Which is fine, IF
> you are going to stick with that version of Sugar.  Very bad, if you
> plan to take your stick home (or just boot from  it) and end run the
> previous version of Sugar.
>
> There are also potential problems with system supplied (fructose?)
> activities, being different on the stick vs. what is on the hard
> drive.
>
> Then there is honey (home directory activities) vs. glucose (core
> sugar environment) compatibility issues.
>
> Place some limits on what has to be supported and what scenarios you
> are willing to have cause
> disaster and maybe something will happen.  Would enough people be
> happy with "Sucrose + Ribose must be identical for this to work" to
> make it worth spending time on?

Could be, perhaps we should hear first about real world scenarios on
which this could be useful? Maybe on a school with computer labs all
with the same Sugar version?

> Is there someplace
> obvious that one could look at in a user's home directory to figure
> out what version of Sugar is
> on the stick in order to refuse to run if versions are different?

Well, the DS directory has a file containing the version of the dir
layout and index format, would that be enough?

> What should happen when a stick is  not installed?  Do you want this
> to be a 'normal' Fedora workstation when the Sugar stick isn't
> installed?  Or a hard drive based SoaS install?  Or a Fedora with
> Sugar install on the hard drive?  I can probably come up with a half
> dozen other
> possible use cases.  Clarify your desires/use cases and maybe someone
> (maybe even me) will
> spend some time on it.

Yeah, wonder how we can get more info about what is needed from the field.

Regards,

Tomeu

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