[Sugar-devel] Current status of collaboration work

[Gonzalo Odiard]

Hi Martin,
I like your proposal of use the wrapper in the activities by at least one
cycle, before include it in the toolkit.
In our experience, once the code is included in the toolkit, is difficult
make changes without breaking activities in
unexpected ways.
I didn't have time to make tests with the wrapper, and is really difficult
do tests for collaboration. We have seen
bugs that appear only when you have many computers, or using jabber but not
when using the mesh, etc.
I think the wrapper is a very, very good start (Thanks Sam and Walter) and
even they provided patches for some activities.
Sadly, some of the activities are on my hands, but I didn't have time the
last months to do the proper testing
and integration of the patches.
About the wrapper API, just looking at the code, I think would be better
add a callback parameter to the setup() method
because the initialization is async and then is the only way to execute
your activity code when the initialization
has finished. Issues like this are difficult to get right at the first time.
I know I am not doing almost any work in sugar these months, don't take
these comments as a critic,
just as a way to try to help, and avoid problems in the future.
Regards,

Gonzalo



On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 4:52 PM, Martin Abente <
martin.abente.lahaye at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I have been reviewing the current state of the collaboration proposals and
> I am afraid it is still too early for merging it. We need to explore more
> use cases, and this will only happens when we start porting more Activities
> that actually use TUBES. Therefore, i want to share some thoughts on this.
>
> *Opinions:*
>
>    1. There haven't been enough changes in the Activities regarding Tubes
>    deprecation.
>    2. Dropping the Tubes support from Sugar without changing all the
>    activities that depend on Tubes means that we will break collaboration for
>    those activities anyway, and there wont be much gain by just doing that.
>    3. Making changes in the Sugar API without proper testing with more
>    activities (and scenarios) is simply not a good idea.
>    4. But, making changes in the Activities can be easily handled since
>    they are self contained.
>    5. Most of our users still use Fedora 18 through OLPC deployments,
>    where Tubes is available.
>
> *Suggestions:*
>
>    1. Lets make Sugar handle the Tubes deprecation better so it doesn't
>    break, but lets not remove the support for TUBES yet.
>    2. Instead, we can start changing the activities using the Wrapper
>    that Walter and Sam prepared, but using it locally on each Activity for now.
>    3. Once and if, we have most of our activities ported to the new
>    telepathy API (which will be based on the Wrapper), then we can include the
>    Wrapper into sugar-toolkit-gtk3, in a next release and remove it from
>    Activities.
>
> *Pros:*
>
>    1. We avoid breaking collaboration for *(a)* Activities that use TUBES
>    and run on older systems where TUBES is available, and *(b)*
>    Activities that does not use TUBES on newer systems where TUBES is no
>    longer available. This _is_ an improvement versus the current situation
>    where is completely broken on newer systems.
>    2. We do this whole re-work incrementally, without having to change
>    the API (sort of) blindly.
>    3. There will be more flexibility to explore ideas in Activities land.
>
> *Cons:*
>
>    1. There will be repeated code in Activities, but that can be changed
>    easily later.
>
>
> *What would be needed:*
>
>    1. To detect if there is TUBES support, as Sam mentioned in his first
>    PR [1]. *Can someone look into this?*
>    2. Do not create TUBES channel when there is not support. This [2] is
>    just a hack and the logic works fine, but it depends on whether or not we
>    can detect support.
>    3. Cleanup the Wrapper and make sure that it is possible to use it
>    locally in activities.
>
> *Other improvements that we could land now:*
>
>    1. Give more flexibility to activities to use file transfer channels
>    without having the shell messing with them. [3]
>
> *Conclusions:*
>
> If we don't do something about this, next Sugar releases will still be
> broken for collaboration, for more scenarios than necessary.
>
>
> Let me know what you guys think,
> Martin.
>
> *Refs:*
> [1] https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/pull/270
> [2]
> https://github.com/tchx84/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/commit/bed0ac5f4259ff1669323db26acb27f5d9c8ed1f
> [3] https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/pull/621
>



-- 
Gonzalo Odiard

SugarLabs - Software [for | by] children learning
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