[Sugar-devel] [PATCH] Journal Volumes Backup and Restore

[Bernie Innocenti]

El Tue, 29-06-2010 a las 15:20 -0400, Martin Langhoff escribió:

> I understand this -- and I am in a similar quandary.
> 
> However, I am bothering you with this because I am a bit worried --
> because two things have combined in an unfortunate way:
> 
>  - the restore action is destructive
> 
>  - it is now in a UI button that is present in the everyday UI
> 
> kids are going to try things. They try things all the time; and
> they'll try the restore button.
> 
> One of the key design concerns in Sugar is that operations should not
> be destructive. You can imagine how a "dangerous" button, made so
> easily available, can be... well... dangerous.

I agree on this. What could we do in max. 1 day of work to mitigate this
problem without giving up the backup restore functionality?

I thought we could add a checkbox "delete current journal before
starting", which is disabled by default.

NOTE: If users don't click it and they don't have enough space, their
filesystem will fill up and Sugar will misbehave until rebooted. On the
next boot, the diskspacerecover script will run, killing a bunch of
activities.

NOTE^2: last week, 16 formadores attacked me very much for the "feature"
of automatically killing activities when the disk is full. I tried to
reason with them that activities are replaceable and user data is more
important to preserve, but they all told me that I don't understand the
problems of a teacher with 30 kids who are missing the activities they
need in order to follow the lesson. They demanded that we change the
feature to delete mp3s instead. To outlive the meeting, had to promise
I'd look into it ;-)

NOTE^3: kids and teachers often ask: "how do I erase my journal?". It
seems that sometimes the journal deletes itself spontaneously (on both
0.82 and 0.84), but users still cannot deliberately erase their journal.
"Why is this needed?" Because jffs2 starts slowing down and misbehaving
when the filesystem is almost full. The kids know this by experience.

It seems we have still a lot of usability work to do :-|

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/