[Sugar-devel] Development Team Meeting, 27th March 9PM UTC

[James Cameron]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 08:10:29AM +1100, James Cameron wrote:
> Developers are invited to attend the next team meeting, on;
> 
> - Tuesday 27th March at 5pm US/Eastern,
> - Tuesday 27th March at 9pm UTC,
> - Wednesday 28th March at 2:30am IST,
> - Wednesday 28th March at 8am Australia/Sydney,

Attending were Anmol, James, Rahul, Walter and Yash.

> Agenda to include
> 
> - what we have been working on,

James reviewed proposals, reviewed a few pull requests, wrote about a
social issue that affects coordination, ported from GConf to
Gio.Settings (for Sugar, toolkit, Browse, Read and Write); and
discovered a GStreamer Gst.Message deprecation.

Rahul researched porting to GTK+ 4, reviewed pull requests, reported
issues in Fructose activities, and completed project proposals for
GSoC application.

Walter has the new Music Blocks server live,

	https://musicblocks.sugarlabs.org/

gave out some Sugar on a Sticks, is aware of a program running out of
a college in upper state NY is doing a lot of after-school outreach
and are very interested, and met a group at LibrePlanet with an office
in Managua and will put them in touch with FZT.

Yash tested a few activities that were in their proposal.

(After the meeting, Devin said that with Walter they did a Music
Blocks workshop at LibrePlanet this past weekend).

> - port from GConf to Gio.Settings,

http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2018-March/055223.html

This came up to us from Debian, who noticed a GTK+ 2 library being
withdrawn, causing withdrawal of Sugar from Debian.

Code affected falls into one or more of these traps;

- Sugar settings migration support for upgrades from GTK+ 2 Sugar,

- Sugar and Toolkit compatibility support for GTK+ 2 activities, so
  that these activities can get user nickname, user colour, age,
  gender, speech pitch, rate, collaboration server, backup server,
  automatic power management, and any other settings from GConf,

- activities that get these settings using the GTK+ 2 GConf API even
  though they have been ported to GTK+ 3, such as Browse, Read, Write,

- activities that manage their own settings using the GTK+ 2 GConf
  API, such as Browse, Write,

Walter says this will impact some other activities as well, such as
Turtle.  Yash says this could have been added to their proposal.
James said we didn't know at the time.  Yash said it can be tackled as
it comes.

Pull requests;

https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/issues/386
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/issues/792
https://github.com/sugarlabs/browse-activity/issues/79
https://github.com/sugarlabs/read-activity/issues/19
https://github.com/sugarlabs/write-activity/issues/23

Two of these pull requests revealed another deprecation, of the
structure member of Gst.Message, also being tracked;

http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2018-March/055245.html

> - don't ask, just do,

James was outspoken

https://github.com/sugarlabs/www-sugarlabs/issues/181#issuecomment-376027257

	"don't use issues as a place to negotiate who will work on
	something"

	"these practices allow the competition of ideas (via pull
	requests) instead of competition of observing capability or
	perceived suitability of a contributor (via issues)"

Walter followed up with a documentation change

https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/pull/148

	"no need to ask permission to work on an issue"

It was asked if this was a cultural difference we need to be aware of,
and if others can work within the open source culture of "code first,
questions later".  Or "show, don't tell".

Some organisations have a culture of work assignment, and so newcomers
may default to it.

Developers can announce that they are working on an issue and if they
don't follow up on that in a day or so, someone else should be free to
take it.

No problem with people announcing they are working on something; but
(a) it can get noisy, (b) it won't stop others working on it too.

We can be comfortable with code first, questions later.

An announcement could be seen as an intent to collaborate; and
collaboration is meant to share, not to dominate or do a seperate
work.

When someone says "I'm going to work on this", one of our responses
can be "Here's what I've done so far, see what you can do."

> #sugar-meeting irc.freenode.net

Post-meeting general question; does anyone know how to make the GitHub
sugarlabs organisation projects visible to people who are logged in to
GitHub but not in the organisation?

https://github.com/orgs/sugarlabs/projects/2

Tried so far;

- Organization settings, Projects, says "Organization project
  permissions Permissions can be managed in the project’s settings on
  a per-project basis."

- View all projects, and individual projects, have no such settings.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/