[Sugar-devel] Collaboration woes

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 23.01.2010, at 17:31, Jim Simmons wrote:
> 
> 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?

I guess this got broken with the switch to using gconf in newer Sugar versions. There is only one config per user, instead of separate profiles.

> 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.

It uses an older Sugar version.

> 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.

You have to set a non-existing Jabber server. This used to work.

> 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.

I think many (if not all) of these issues do also even happen in deployment situations. Collaboration does not work reliably yet. Another item on the way to Sugar 1.0 ...

- Bert -