[Sugar-devel] ASLO shut down target date? (was: licensing question)

[Tony Anderson]

Hi, Dave

I appreciate the attempt to discuss this issue.

My take is that James is reflecting his view that there is no difference 
between Sugar and a Sugar activity - they all get built together. I am 
ignorant of the benefit of using Debian or Fedora packaging. The xo 
bundle is a zip file and is not dependent on packaging. This may have 
some benefit in building SOAS.
By the way I mean 'live' as in a live cd which can be booted without 
touching the host or used for installation.

For the past decade, Sugar builds have been released with a selected set 
of activities. Normally the set in OLPC builds has included as many 
activities as there was room on the XO (fewer on XO-1 than the other 
models).  This apparently from an assumption that once distributed, 
users have no opportunity to add new activities.

Actually, ASLO provided that capability. However, the XOs in Peru and 
Uruguay (by a deliberate use of the root password to prevent it) did not 
have realistic access to ASLO.

When I volunteered in Nepal, it was immediately obvious that the limited 
storage of the XO required a school server - a local computer with 
content that can be downloaded to the Journal as desired and then 
deleted when not needed. So one of the requirements was to provide a 
local version of ASLO (http://schoolserver/sugaractivitie). This has 
been available for several years.

This year I decided on a major project to update this capability by 
fixing broken activities and providing as rich a library as possible. 
The priority changed with the release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS which does not 
support gtk2. Fortunately Gtk3 is essentially syntactic sugar requiring 
no logical changes to the activities. I suspect that gtk2 activities 
which work on an XO also work on Sugar with Ubuntu 16.04 - but the LTS 
feature is compelling for dealing with the problem.

The entire ALSO library including all activities in the github repo 
requires only 5GB. With a current laptop with an Ubuntu installation, 
this can easily be installed on the local computer (I use 
/home/username/aslolite). This is a powerful opportunity - every 
activity is available to be fixed, making a new version level. It is 
easy to write scripts to test every activity for conformance to 
standards (e.g. which activities use class instead of exec or are gtk2 
or web or Gtk3).

In my experience about 50% of the activities do not work. This platform 
provides a base for quickly testing activities on an XO and recording 
whether they work or not and providing some comment about the problem. I 
used the platform to test the xo bundles created from the github repos. 
The ratio of 103/191 fits this experience.

Tony

On Saturday, 26 May, 2018 12:50 AM, Dave Crossland wrote:
>
>
> On 25 May 2018 at 00:47, Tony Anderson <tony_anderson at usa.net 
> <mailto:tony_anderson at usa.net>> wrote:
>
>     ASLO provides access to Sugar activities (*.xo bundles). Ways in
>     which users get Sugar is not relevant. 
>
>
> When James said, "plenty of disk space these days to include all 
> working activities in a build", that suggested to me that that this is 
> relevant; when users 'sudo apt-get install sucrose' will they also get 
> all working activities?
>
>     In my experience, XO users install Sugar from the images on
>     laptop.org <http://laptop.org>. 
>
>
> James, surely "plenty of disk space these days" doesn't apply to 
> images built for XO-1 machines?
>
>     For Ubuntu, I assume sudo apt-get install sucrose. SOAS is not
>     live and the usb stick is built from the SOAS image (dd). 
>
>
> To clarify, when you say, "SOAS is not live", do you mean the last 
> SOAS image was released a long time ago?
>
>     I haven't yet tried Sugar on RPI but I believe this is a sudo
>     apt-get sucrose to Raspbian.
>
>
> I would expect so
>
>     In each case a number of activities selected by the packager is
>     included. However, users should be able to access the entire library.
>
>
> If a packager includes all working activities, then users can and do 
> access the "entire" library.
>
>     The fundamental problem is to fix the broken activities.
>
>
> True; but, even as more broken activities become fixed, given the 
> actually used packager's images include all working activities, the 
> situation remains the same.
>
>     Current statistics taken a few minutes ago show that there are 327
>     activities available on ASLO alone. These are generally gtk2
>     activities which are not usable in the Ubuntu Sugar. There are 191
>     activities with github repos. Of these, 103 work on the Ubuntu
>     Sugar and are available as xo bundles from aslolite.
>
>
> Good to know. Are those gtk2 .xo bundles 'broken'?
>
> Cheers
> Dave
>
>
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