[Sugar-devel] Where shall I start contributing?

[Tony Anderson]

I am not 'surprised' by this - I am shocked! There are only 10 
activities installed on the Ubuntu Sugar. The rest must be obtained from 
ASLO. Ubuntu 18.04 does not support GTK. The net effect is that few of 
the activities on ASLO will work in Sugar on Ubuntu.

We have wasted precious technical resources to perform the port and then 
failing to deliver the results to our users. Fixing this would seem to 
be within the scope of the 'Say no to GTK' project.

The purpose of the spreadsheet is to make our status visible. We need to 
operate in the real world. I believe we should clearly distinguish 
between ASLO (the activities in activities.sugarlabs.org/activities/ and 
ASLO the addon interface. Our problem with ASLO is primarily the poor 
state of the activities/ and not the interface (which has its own 
problems, of course). The spreadsheet is based on activities/. During my 
professional life, it was considered mandatory to collect the facts and 
make a plan before implementation. I think you will be pleasantly 
surprised when a contributor has a specific task that is clearly needed 
and clearly defined.

Even if I had time to maintain activities, I would probably still not 
consider that a good use of my time. The update procedure is 
inappropriate to the task. Contributing an update to an activity does 
not require the procedures appropriate for Sugar itself. A problem with 
an activity only affects that activity so the maximum risk for error is 
limited. In the original ASLO procedure, the registered contributor 
updates the version with each change. Each submitted change was reviewed 
- normally by Walter Bender - before being added to ASLO. I shudder to 
think the time that would be required to update the version number for 
Hello World from 6 to 7.

Tony


On Saturday, 12 May, 2018 09:15 AM, James Cameron wrote:
> Yes, and that's in my linked guide to contributing.
>
> https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/blob/master/src/contributing.md#modifying-activities
>
> Don't be surprised at the "not the same" situation.  Changes (commits)
> to activities are made on GitHub without updating the version number
> and making a release.  This is so that changes can be combined and
> tested before a release, instead of making a release after every
> change.  But at the moment, without activity maintainers, the changes
> don't get tested, changes don't get released, bundles don't get made,
> and upload isn't happening.  These steps are missing;
>
> https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/blob/master/src/contributing.md#checklist---maintainer
>
> Incidentally, I'm certain ASLOv3 won't help with that; because it
> won't do anything to combine and test changes; the human intelligence
> step in making a release.  Barking up the wrong tree.
>
> Thanks for the spreadsheet views, but I fear they will do nothing
> except to make our human problem so much larger by making it more
> visible.  ;-)
>
> Could you be an activity maintainer instead?  I'm maintaining Record
> at the moment, and have nearly finished porting to GTK+ 3 and
> GStreamer 1.14.  I've been at it on and off since 2016, and it has
> consumed most of my week.
>
> On Sat, May 12, 2018 at 08:30:58AM +0800, Tony Anderson wrote:
>> I believe our immediate need is maintenance on ASLO
>> (Acitivities.SugarLabs.org). It is going to take another day or two to
>> complete reviewing the bundles from http://github.com/SugarLabs; however, it
>> is evident that a large number have the name version number as the version
>> on ASLO but are not the same. Sadly, this means that many of the conversions
>> to GTK3 are not available to users with Sugar on Ubuntu.
>>
>> When finished I will post an updated spreadsheet showing the problem
>> bundles.
>>
>> Tony
>>
>> On Saturday, 12 May, 2018 08:19 AM, James Cameron wrote:
>>> Someone asked me privately how they might contribute.  My answer may
>>> be useful to others.
>>>
>>> Someone said;
>>>> where should I start?
>>> Thanks for your question.
>>>
>>> 1.  don't ask this question privately if you don't need to; Sugar Labs
>>> is an open community project, and this kind of question is best asked
>>> in public on sugar-devel@ mailing list, so that you get the most
>>> complex of responses, from which you can average or integrate.
>>>
>>> 2.  my recent post "How to get started as a Sugar Labs developer" may
>>> be helpful; rather than quote it here, I'll link to it;
>>>
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2018-April/055284.html
>>>
>>> 3.  our documentation for new contributors suggests many things, so be
>>> sure to read these documents;
>>>
>>> https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/blob/master/src/how-can-i-help.md
>>> https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/blob/master/src/contributing.md
>>>
>>> 4.  you might follow along behind the GSoC teams, and read their
>>> meeting minutes, use http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/ to watch for new
>>> meetings, to learn how others work,
>>>
>>> 5.  you will know from my GitHub activity that my contribution is
>>> coding.  If you do coding, you will talk to me quite a bit.  If you do
>>> something other than coding, I might not answer much.  Someone else
>>> would help you instead.
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> Disclosure statement; I'm a contributor to Sugar Labs and am paid by
>>> One Laptop per Child.  It is in my interest if you work on Sugar
>>> activities that OLPC uses.
>>>
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