[Sugar-devel] Sugar-On-The-Ground features (was: Re: GSoC weekly meeting)

[Sebastian Silva]

El 16/05/16 a las 02:11, Tony Anderson escribió:
> The home view patch is intended to 'reverse' that decision. The
> original idea that activities start new from the home view and are
> resumed from the Journal is clear and easy to understand. In many
> classrooms, users are surprised when they launch an activity and find
> it not at the main screen but in the middle of some other person's
> work. I have had teachers ask students to launch Browse only to have
> some embarassed when it plays music.

Those are valid concerns. While dogfooding (using Sugar myself), I found
resume-by-default quite handy. I've also observed teachers in the ground
knowing to clic "Start New" (but never the shift-key undiscoverable
shortcut).

I would like to ask the "soporte-digete" list which holds some 400
teacher-trainers from Peru for their opinion and I'll get back to you.

>
> The design discussion on the backup is at
> https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar-server_Journal_backup.
So who will work on this, Utkarsh or Manash?
> The combination of a school server and Sugar is a system in which both
> parts must work together. As I understand it there are
> three environments for Sugar: standalone, with an active internet
> connection, and with a school server and no or limited internet access.
> The Sugar on the Ground is intended to support the third environment.
Your assumption is wrong, in that not everyone will use the same flavour
of server. In Perú, some will use the Ministry's PeruEduca distro,
others will use some Ubuntu flavour, or who knows what else. None use
the xs schoolserver as prepared by this community. Same thing for
Argentina, where Huayra GNU/Linux includes some parts of Sugar and have
their own server solution. You can't assume a homogeneous network or
that you will have the luxury of dictating how the server is configured,
but you might assume most if not all will have ssh+rsync. These are not
small deployments either.
> Originally, OLPC deployment was standalone with a laptop-laptop
> network for collaboration. However, it was realized that much more
> could be done in a deployment with a school server to provide access
> to some of the content available on the internet. Unfortunately Sugar
> did not work closely with Martin Langhoff to make for a
> well-integrated system.
It was actually Mr. Langhoff who did not develop standard solutions that
could be upstreamable into standard GNU/Linux distributions and worked
with assumptions such as the schoolserver being the only server in the
network etc. We should not make the same mistake.

>
> The keys are handled by registration. No change is intended. Rsync is
> the current backup scheme but it is not appropriate to the
> requirement. The wiki describes the intent of the change in detail.
> AFIK, there is no more requirement for local administration than is
> required by the current system.
I've personally never seen registration feature work. I'd be thrilled if
it could be generalized, or broken out into a standard package that
could be distributed independent of a huge custom server distribution.

My concern is that these features are rather simple to implement, but
hard to decide on. A medium-experienced python programmer might do each
in a couple of days. Utkarsh is a fine programmer so we should have him
do something significant with real impact, and avoid design deadlocks.