[Sugar-devel] Minor update to Make Your Own Sugar Activities!

[Tony Anderson]

Hi James,

Your book is a wonder and should be much more actively promoted. It is 
one of the major contributions of Sugar to constructive learning.

I believe the use of git.sugarlabs.org and github are major steps 
backwards from the original conception of Sugar activities as something 
which users could develop and make available to the community. In the 
first place, the activity bundle contains the source code that is 
actually being executed. Second, there is a simple version system in 
activity.info. The Developer Hub at activities.sugarlabs.org supplies an 
adequate means to control maintenance activities (in the PR sense of 
having someone monitor changes before releasing them for general use).

If one wanted to update an activity, say TuxMath, now the first step 
would be to clone the repository not install the activity itself.

The ASLO site needs some work. Currently, the latest version is not 
necessarily exposed (see Browse or TuxMath, for example). In some cases, 
activities do not support Arm or use Hulahop and there is no way to 
specify which versions of Sugar or its platforms are supported. The 
availability of maintainers who know the PhP implementation of ASLO is 
apparently dwindling. Perhaps Sugar Labs could undertake to re-implement 
ASLO using Python (Django, flask, ...) or javascript to broaden the base 
of potential maintainers.

However, dependence on github creates a duplicate repository for the 
source code. With 400+ activities, there is no mechanism in github to 
make the activities visible. Currently it may require searching 7 
screens to find if an activity is there (unlike ASLO which has an 
effective search capability).

I am sympathetic to the desire to acquaint our users with git and the 
concept of version control. However, this approach limits the 
opportunity to those who have internet access (probably a minority of 
our users).

A more effective approach would be to determine how git could be 
installed in Sugar ( a git activity?) so that it can be used. Your book 
could then be used as a basis for helping our users learn to develop 
activities using version-control. In this way version control can be 
used locally by the developer prior to submitting an updated or new 
activity to ASLO (which may well involve a visit to an internet cafe).

Tony

Tony

On 03/14/2017 03:39 AM, James Simmons wrote:
> All,
>
> I have been neglecting the manual /Make Your Own Sugar Activities!/ 
> ever since I first wrote it. However, I did manage to make one needed 
> update in the laziest way possible. Since Sugar Labs has moved away 
> from git.sugarlabs.org <http://git.sugarlabs.org> in favor of GitHub 
> since I wrote the version control chapter I have added the following 
> note to that chapter:
>
>     *Important Note*: When this chapter was written Sugar Labs was
>     still using *git.sugarlabs.org <http://git.sugarlabs.org>* as its
>     code repository. While this still exists, the preferred repository
>     is now https://github.com/, using the *sugarlabs* organization.
>     This chapter is still a reasonable introduction to using Git, but
>     when you set up your project repository you should use the
>     excellent instructions provided on GitHub instead of the Gitorious
>     instructions provided here.
>
>
> I hope this helps in some way.
>
> James Simmons
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20170314/4f20cbe1/attachment.html>