[Sugar-devel] Hi; GSoC?

[Aleksey Lim]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 03:50:35AM -0400, Isaac Dupree wrote:
> On 03/18/10 12:27, Aleksey Lim wrote:
> > ...
> > [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Documentation_Team/Services/Activity_Developers_Guide
> > [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Documentation_Team/Services/Service_Developers_Guide
> > [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Zero_Sugar_Activities
> > [4] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-March/023047.html
> 
> So: I'm reading these links -- a nice place to start, on the wiki.  Then 
> should I have a conversation with one of you to brainstorm/figure out 
> what projects might be good for the future of Sugar?

Well, the future of Sugar is being formed by people who use/contibute-to
sugar :) so if you are sharing this direction, just do what you
can/think,-is-important. Particular ideas could be discussed by
interested in participating people on MLs/IRC and formalized on wiki.

> (for example, if we want to have a more definitive "0sugar was a bad 
> idea" vs. "now we see a path for things to work great together" could 
> result.

In my mind the core idea behind 0install scheme is decentralized and
scalable [5] model of developing/sharing sugar related code(not only
activity code itself).  Of course it is only one part of sugar ecosystem
(another part is deployment oriented schemes, like OLPC of SoaS) and all
parts could work at the same time (even for the same people).

Thus I'm sure, decentralized model is important(as a part of sugar) and
proper implementation could be found only after taking first steps on
this road.

> Has there been any particularly enlightening e-mail controversy 
> I could read?  Or perhaps there are some pressing engineering questions, 
> to solve in whichever way, and I need to get a better feel for how we 
> decide which questions to tackle next.)
> 
> It will be helpful to play with zero and with sugar a bit more to 
> re-familiarize myself with them.
> Sugar Questions/issues (either a wiki pointer or response would be 
> excellent) :
> - I downloaded Sugar-on-a-Stick image; I could run it in an emulator 
> (qemu-kvm) but I didn't see how to make it persistent (remember my name, 
> or upgraded activities, after a restart). Is there a way?
> - (my MacBook BIOS doesn't like to boot from USB, unfortunately.)
> - I tried installing the distro packaging of sugar (0.86.3) on my Arch 
> Linux x86_64, but sugar-emulator seems to turn to a black screen after I 
> entered name and xo-color. Hmm. The packaging-metadata looked quite 
> straightforwards (albeit with lots of dependencies upon dependencies and 
> I have no idea if they're the correct ones).

I think it would be better to deep yourself into sugar developing at first,
later you can figure out what is important or not. I can share my own
experience, my first steps were:

* reimplementing sugar-toolkit in C (w/o any knowledge about sugar
  before) thus I was discovered how sugar works from its core.

* packaging sugar for distros 

Both these case could be still important (and they are, at least for me)
and relate to decentralized and scalable development model and could be
gsoc projects as well:

* C based sugar-toolkit, for now Vala based[6], will let originally not
  sugar projects, look and behave in sugar properly. I'm coding it right
  now and going to use in Library-2 activity

* 0install based sugar distribution [7], e.g. users can install the whole
  sugar be several click in their current environment to home directory
  i.e. w/o any root privileges.

[5] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Documentation_Team/Services/Scalable_development_model
[6] http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/toolkit
[7] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Saccharin

-- 
Aleksey