[Sugar-devel] Current status of collaboration work

[Tony Anderson]

Hi Sam,

I am still not clear on the status. I have a long-dormant activity 
'bingo' which depends on the caller sending 'bingo cards', receiving a 
'bingo call', and being able to check the card via collaboration. In 
developing those features, should I use the collab wrapper? Is it 
available for 0.106? Where can I find the version of
chat that uses it as an example to follow? The version installed on 
0.106 (13.2.5) does not seem to use it.

Tony

On 12/26/2015 01:55 AM, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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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