[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Proposal: Lease expiry information display in My Settings -> About My Computer

[Daniel Drake]

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 1:12 PM, Anish Mangal <anish at activitycentral.com> wrote:
> One problem they were also trying to get around in Paraguay is that
> during vacations, the kids don't go to the schools and hence the
> leases expire. If the kids also know about this information, then they
> can easily make sure that they don't get 'locked out'

You'd hope that the project would make provisions for long-enough
leases to be supplied before the vacations.
But I can see the use for this for when that doesn't happen (which is
understandable given high workloads and so on).

Talking more with the team in Nicaragua, this functionality would be
useful for them too. Similar situations are occuring here where
laptops were activated for a certain amount of time, with the strong
expectation that internet connectivity would become available in the
schools before the activations expire (so that they can be
automatically updated/renewed). These expectations look like they
won't turn out to be true :(

So a manual activation update process will happen and the ability for
someone less-technical to be able to quickly check whether this manual
update process has completed OK would be of value (that would be the
person's only contact with activations - we aren't expecting them to
be able to solve any problems if the results are bad, other than
report up the chain).

Anyway, the use cases you describe in your mail don't seem to be
described on the feature page. Could you please extend the feature
page to go into more detail about this? I'll then add the above local
case if its of interest.


Why is the proposal to show the number of days remaining?

The Nicaraguan team have expressed a strong preference that this
should (instead, or additionally) display the expiry date. When
dealing with long duration activations, which is often the case (until
good connectivity is established), having a teacher phone up and say
"there are 137 days remaining" (and then having to calculate the day
of expiry in order to put an appropriately timed school visit on the
calendar) would be a pain.

> Since this feature is only relevant for the XO at the moment, making
> use of the bitfrost API would be acceptable to me, but I don't see a
> lot wrong here by parsing the lease.sig directly. This file is
> supposed to be automatically generated/updated in normal use cases.

Are you planning to parse sig02 (delegated leases) "by hand" as well?
What if the lease is corrupt in some way?

I can see myself objecting to any implementation of this that doesn't
reuse bitfrost. It takes care of all of the corner cases and will
avoid code duplication.

Daniel