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

[Anish Mangal]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for replying!

On Tuesday 07 August 2012 10:12 PM, Daniel Drake wrote:
> 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).
> 

This is exactly the kind of clear info that should have been in the
feature page in the first place. Sorry for not doing it earlier.

> 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.
> 

+1

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

Yes, I remember discussing specifically this with Roberto (PyEduca
Technical head) back in Dec 2010, and my suggestion was exactly the
same (to display the date).

However, as per them (and I know this is not a rational explanation),
they wanted us to display "no 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.
> 

I agree with this, and since I cannot seem to remember exactly why
they wanted it to display in terms of no. of days remaining, I'll ping
them or we can go with this.

>> 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.
> 

Again, it seemed to solve the use case we had in Paraguay, and the
idea behind upstreaming a feature is that it goes through this process
of review. I am up for changing the code to use the bitfrost api. It
should not be complex (if it's adequately documented somewhere).

> Daniel _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel
> mailing list Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org 
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
> 


- -- 
Anish Mangal
Dextrose Project Manager
Activity Central
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJQIUh6AAoJEBoxUdDHDZVpEX8H/j5oCzGUvnfIWdy1f/awAnkf
Trtsm4Me8r2D0ufxEyIZkUHugCQPUTdPqDEAlexr8ziQjy8mqNLrbvEWwwxxl4ho
XstY7RZsk9gPGVYiE1bLniIZnO5e63lIyBEkM3eNgkHrO8XTPw86lBBcTcx9XDrx
T00HW8J1UGDMo29SRcrnxnNVd6j+uArJXcaeSXhLAPb3xkaharF22AbTlWgQ+4s5
YIzvIfmEYMpqXbCCY+IPSVxzcpdRuHhueaFKchDfzRm01Wf77laACUg6+ZFkq/Ft
9ChV1LNekysQwf+yCZ9dB9HZdfIjjJ4m1WjrPhrQtqruevs9/nglTp2djqsPU00=
=QHV1
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----