[Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2011-05-27

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. I am working on a modification of Sugar's View Source mechanism that
allows the user to make modifications to copies of the source code. So far,
I have it working for Sugar activities. It is quite simple actually: I added
a palette button to the existing viewsource.py code (written by Tomeu
Vizoso) to make a local copy of the activity being viewed. I rename the copy
to MyActivity and change the bundle_id to bundle_id_my_copy.

It is that simple: one mouse click and you have a copy of any activity
available to modify while leaving the original activity intact. And you
immediately see a working copy of the activity on your Sugar Home View.

As far as making modifications, at present, I am leaving it the user to open
the Terminal activity and make changes using vi or nano. I am considering
enabling either Pippy or the Edit activity to open files in ~/Activities or
to expose ~/Activities in the Journal in much the way we are considering for
~/Documents. Feedback would be appreciated.

Next up is to do something similar with Sugar itself. I am working on a
patch that will provide View Source to Sugar and the Sugar toolkit. (The
current version of my patch adds a View Source Button as a menu item under
the Journal icon on the Frame.) Once I have this working, adding a copy
mechanism, perhaps to ~/site-packages, would be a simple modification.
Change sys.path and you are up and running on a locally modifiable version.
No root access required!

I have to think through the implications of how the user will switch back
and forth between Sugar versions. With activities, since I change the
bundle_id, the original and modified versions can coexist. It is not
obvious--at least to me--how to have two different versions of Sugar running
in parallel. This wouldn't be a problem as long as the user doesn't make a
change to Sugar that causes it to crash, but I expect (hope) that will
happen frequently. (As Samuel Beckett said: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No
matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.") So we need some recovery
mechanism that is not dependent on a working Sugar.

2. In the very cool department: Check out Koji Yokokawa's project that
enables you to control Scratch from Etoys (See
http://www.squeaksource.com/ScratchConnect.html).

=== In the community ===

3. The New Zealand Testing Team is expanding: Tabitha Roder and Tom Parker
are happy to announce the arrival of Oliver Nathan Erasmus Parker, born
17:38 on 6 May (See pictures at http://carrott.org/gingernut/).

4. The joint GNOME and KDE 2011 Desktop Summit is taking place in Berlin
from August 6–12.

=== Sugar Labs ===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the
IAEP mailing list.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-May-14-20-som.jpg 2011 (74 emails)
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-May-7-13-som.jpg 2011 (75 emails)

Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about Sugar
and Sugar deployments.

-walter
-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
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