[Sugar-devel] Collaboration woes

[Jim Simmons]

Last night I attempted to begin the chapter in my book on
collaboration in Sugar.  Some of my Activities do file transfers so I
have had some experience with it before.  It seems to me that setting
up a test environment for collaboration has always been a source of
frustration but I don't remember a time when I had this many things
not work at the same time.

1).  When I attempt to run multiple copies of sugar-emulator in Fedora
11 using this command line:

SUGAR_PROFILE=mark sugar-emulator

it creates a directory "mark" under ~/.sugar and prompts me for name
and color selection as it should.  If I then do

SUGAR_PROFILE=jane sugar-emulator

it creates a directory "jane" and prompts for name and colors.  Now if
I go back and do

SUGAR_PROFILE=mark sugar-emulator

again I get Jane's name and colors, or whoever I did the most
recently.  It looks like you can create new profiles for having
multiple sugar-emulators running but you can't RETURN to any profile
but the latest one you created.

sugar-jhbuild on Fedora 11 is even worse.  If I do something like

SUGAR_PROFILE=jane ./sugar-jhbuild run

it will prompt me to change my colors but NOT my name.

It looks to me like there is no way to run two copies of
sugar-emulator or sugar-jhbuild on Fedora 11.  What am I missing here?

The situation on Fedora 10 is better.  There I CAN run two copies of
sugar-emulator using SUGAR_PROFILE and it seems to work the way it
ought to.

Now I attempt to go to the Neighborhood pane in both sugar-emulators
on F10 to see who's there.  The documentation says that if there is no
Jabber server configured then Sugar will automatically look for other
Sugar users on the same network segment.  It would figure that two
copies of sugar-emulator running on the same damned box would be able
to find each other but no.  They are both alone in their
neighborhoods.  This doesn't bug me all that much because frankly the
no Jabber option has NEVER worked for me.  Not once.  Not on Xubuntu,
not on SUSE, not on Fedora 10, not on Fedora 11.

So I try various Jabber servers from this page:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_Jabber_Servers

Of all of them only jabber.laptop.org lets me see other users in the
Neighborhood.  Not the other copy of sugar-emulator I have running.
No, that would be too much to hope for.  But in ONE copy of
sugar-emulator I see ONE other user.  The other copy sees nobody.

I've let both copies of sugar-emulator run for awhile and now they can
both see the same set of users.  Needless to say they still can't see
EACH OTHER.

I also have sugar-jhbuild running on my F11 box, and it can see the
same three users but nobody else.

I just wish I knew how to deal with this situation, or that Sugar
could do something to at least give me a hint if something is wrong
with my setup.  If I can't get around it then the "Make Your Own Sugar
Activities!" book will have no chapter on collaboration.

Sorry for all the venting.

James Simmons