[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Testing of Activities

[D. Joe]

So, is the idea here to add new git tags, for example: 

 https://github.com/sugarlabs/write-activity/releases

to keep the tags in line with the value of activity_version as changed, for instance, in
this commit:

 https://github.com/sugarlabs/write-activity/commit/b95f2901941c0cff871124e042c76e4340517ebb

for the file activity.info

 https://github.com/sugarlabs/write-activity/blob/master/activity/activity.info

??

Just trying to get a handle here on how this is to be tracked and
maintained, how.

Do we increment activity versions with each commit? I see some activities
hosted on github have something of a branch structure, but its not clear to
me if or how one would use this to differentiate between things that match
the ASLO versions versus those that have diverged from what's on ASLO. 

I have no great background in release engineering, but it would make sense
to me to have, eg, 'master' contain only sets of commits that correspond
with things that have been put on ASLO, and a "development" branch (or
whatever name) which gets tagged with the next, upcoming version number and
continues to diverge from ASLO until such time as it gets merged back into
"master", ASLO gets updated, and the version number in "development"
incremented.

Or maybe there should branches, one for each platform? This is the point at
which a "sugarizer" branch might be able to accomodate activities targeted
at that platform, but still share, eg, design elements with the desktop
activity, perhaps?  Would, then, an "ASLO" branch track only what runs on
XOs?  Or should each model get its own branch so we know what runs on what? 
Would each GNU/Linux distro get its own branch, eg "fedora-27"?

On the one hand, I'm very leery of the latter approach because there's
already such a proliferation of ...  stuff in the broader Sugar community. 
On the other hand, this is just an attempt to figure out how to make some
sense of what is already out there using some of the tools at hand meant
specifically for managing development complexity.

-- 
Joe

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 12:09:55PM -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
> In the meantime, it may make sense to walk through all of the repos in
> sugarlabs on GH and ensure that those with changes get updated version numbers,
> new .xo and .gtar files, and we update ASLO and downloads. It seems our only
> mechanism for doing this is manual at the moment. Tony, if you publish the list
> of activities that are working properly from your recent tests, I will begin
> the process of updating version numbers (and ensuring that the correct repo
> path is in the activity.info bundle) and making the new bundles.
> 
> -walter
> 
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 10:19 AM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>     On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 1:30 AM, Tony Anderson <tony_anderson at usa.net>
>     wrote:
>     > I spent the last two plus days testing the 137 activities with
>     repositories
>     > in github/sugarlabs.
> 
>     Thank you for this effort, clearly additional follow up is required
>     and I hope it occurs.
>    
>     > Localization also needs some attention. The setup.py enables a developer
>     to
>     > generate a master Pot file while building a bundle for release to ASLO.
>     That
>     > is probably the limit of the developer's responsibility. However,
>     existing
>     > activities over time have developed localization for many languages.
>     Changes
>     > to the messages will need new translations. Perhaps the developer can use
>     > diff to find differences in the Pot and to eliminate un-needed changes
>     and
>     > test that new messages are passed through. This could enable prompt
>     release
>     > of a new version without waiting for the localization team to provide
>     > translations for dozens of languages.
> 
>     For a very long time, instructions to developers have been "run the
>     POT generation and never ever touch anything in the PO directory
>     again, The L10n team will take care of the rest of it for you.".
>     Unfortunately over the course of time, with changes in Pootle
>     versions, migration of our repositories to GitHub and the decay of a
>     "pootle-helpers" script set originally created by Sayamindu Dasgupta,
>     the early tight and hands-free integration between Pootle and the
>     repos has suffered and much of the process has returned to manual
>     intervention.  The best path back to such a L10n nirvana is an
>     upcoming release of Pootle (ver 2.8) that brings back repo integration
>     through the implementation of the pootle-fs file system.
> 
>     At the present time if the messages of an activity are being changed,
>     we are still dependent upon periodic refreshes of the POT file which
>     can be accomplished with "setup.py genpot".  I manually upload that
>     renewed template to Pootle and refresh the existing PO files from the
>     template and call for completion of any new strings.  With the
>     gracious help of James Cameron in generating refreshed POT files, this
>     process has been initiated (and substantially completed) for the
>     entire Fructose collection and I am systematically committing the
>     refreshed PO files to the GitHub repos.(feel free to examine/monitor
>     pull request activity by github user leonardcj).
> 
>     https://github.com/leonardcj?tab=overview&from=2017-01-01&to=2017-01-31&
>     utf8=%E2%9C%93
> 
>     As for suggesting the reuse of strings common to already translated
>     activities, this is clearly a "best i18n practice", that should be
>     encouraged.
> 
>     I do envision sheparding us back to an enlightened era where
>     developers largely can expect localizers to take care of things for
>     them (primarily through a migration to the 2.8 version of pootle when
>     finally released (or possibly 2.8.1 bug fix version if one follows
>     traditional Microsoft upgrade best practices).  Ideally, Pootle would
>     take care of POT regeneration on the backend, as we used to have it
>     do.
> 
>     cjl
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>     Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>  

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-- 
-- 
Joe   On ceding power to tech companies: http://xkcd.com/1118/
man screen | grep -A2 weird
  A weird imagination is most useful to gain full advantage of
  all the features.