Difference between revisions of "Activity Team"
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* don't forget to update addons as well!! | * don't forget to update addons as well!! | ||
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* and to copy the tar file to download.sugarlabs.org | * and to copy the tar file to download.sugarlabs.org |
Revision as of 18:12, 29 December 2010
Mission
The Activity Team develops and maintains many of the activities available for Sugar. We also encourage independent developers to write activities, and we support them in their efforts. Our goal is to ensure that Sugar provides a complete set of high quality educational, collaborative, constructivist activities.
Our responsibilities
- Develop and maintain the ecosystem of Sugar activities.
- Recruit and mentor activity developers from the community.
- Collect, document and organize new activity and activity feature ideas from the Education Team, deployments and community.
- Work with the Development Team and the Infrastructure Team to ensure activity developers are well supported.
- Gather feedback with the Deployment Team about how Sugar activities are doing in the field.
Tips for Activity Developers
Ask your 'newbie' question on-line
Join IRC channel #sugar-newbies (e.g. via web client) and ask your question about activity, or sugar core, development process. Also browse chat logs.
Creating a new activity
Problems logging in to Gitorious?
Gitorious users are sometimes having their IP addresses incorrectly blacklisted by OSU-OSL, the organization that hosts git.sugarlabs.org. If your SSH key is rejected with the error "Access denied or bad repository path", please open a ticket by emailing support@ouosl.org.
This has happened to a number of activity authors and we are working on getting it resolved.
Move an activity
We need help moving activities over to Sugar Labs from OLPC's servers. This is a great way to get started helping out the Activity Team. See Activity Team/How_to_migrate_from_OLPC for instructions, and Activity Team/Activity Status for the list of activities that need to be moved.
While moving activities, it would be great to check that the .pot files are up to date and the MANIFEST is correct. This will really help out the distro packagers.
Cross-platform compatibility
As Sugar is integrated into more distros and the hardware base expands, it is important to keep Activity developers informed of any issues they need be aware of. For example, when Sugar was only expected to run on the XO-1 laptop, it was safe to assume that the display was always 1200x900.
The Compatibility Tips page is a place to accumulate tips.
Modify Activities
A guide has been written describing how to make simple modifications to popular Sugar activities. Examples include adding sounds to TamTam, blocks to TurtleArt, buttons to Calculate, etc.
General overview of git
Read the brief overview below but then start with our git tutorial.
glossary
- VCS
- Version Control System — keeps track of changes to a set of files.
- git
- the distributed VCS used by Sugar Labs
- commit
- set of changes to files tracked by a VCS, accompanied by metadata (author, description, etc.)
- diff/patch
- (usually textual) representation of changes. These are also the names of specific tools used to create/apply these representations of changes.
- repository
- storage place for commits, usually of a certain piece of software
- gitorious
- software for hosting git repositories, including a web interface for administration
- git.sugarlabs.org
- server hosted by Sugar Labs running gitorious
Setup
(once per machine you're working on)
git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/whatever/mainline.git whatever
Regular usage
cd whatever
[hack away and test your changes]
git diff
[review your changes, go back to hacking if you notice a mistake]
git status git add NameOfNewFile # if you created any file you want included git commit -a
[describe your changes - by convention the first line is a summary and the remaining lines are long description] [start again at hacking if you're offline]
git log origin/master..master # shows you all commits not pushed yet git push # if/once you are online
Git offers a lot more commands and features that can make your life easier, but it's best to start off small and use only those mentioned above. It's very easy to get confused if you're unfamiliar with git.
Even if you use the more advanced features, git does a pretty good job at allowing you to recover from your mistakes. So if you ever mess up and don't know how to fix it yourself, please stop (at least for me that's usually the hardest part ;) ), try to recollect the exact sequence of actions (e.g. from shell history) and ask for help.
Once you have migrated your project, you may have some more detailed questions regarding how Sugar Labs uses git, particularly in regard to patch management.
Additional background on git
- Sugar Labs git FAQ
- Git Community Book
- John Wiegley has written an overview of git: Git from the bottom up.
- Charles Duran from Harvard has written a lovely overview of git at Understanding Git Conceptually.
- GNOME maintains a list of references to git for mortals.
- Pro Git by Scott Chacon
- Gitcasts
- Anish Mangal explains the git workflow on the Sugar development mailing list
Testers
Please see the Activity Test-table page for tester information.
Background information
Sugar Activities
There is an Activities page where we highlight Sugar activities in the wiki. (We need to discuss how best to manage the content of this page as well as how to manage the activity-specific sub-pages.)
Sugar Human Interface Guidelines
The Sugar Human Interface Guidelines content has also been migrated to Sugar Labs. This guide is a critical resource when designing activities.
- An Activity HIG discussion
Sugar Almanac
The Sugar Almanac content has been migrated to Sugar Labs. It's a great, quick reference when building python Activities.
activities.sugarlabs.org
The Sugar Activity Library is our user-facing portal for Sugar activities. The site uses the back-end Mozilla built for Firefox and Thunderbird extensions at addons.mozilla.org, called Remora. To help out, check out Activity Library.
sugar-widgets library
See Development Team/sugar-port.
sugar-sprites library
See Activity Team/Sugar-sprites
Misc.
Activity Team users on activities.sugarlabs.org
Fake emails to identify users:
- activity.team@sugarlabs.org activities that are supported by Activity Team
- trash@dev.null activities to remove
setup.py
There is a handy utility that is a standard part of Sugar Activity bundles, setup.py. You should use it to create and update POT files, generate a MANIFEST file and update locale files, and create .xo and .tar files for distribution.
./setup.py genpot ./setup.py build ./setup.py fix_manifest ./setup.py dist_xo ./setup.py dist_source
Packaging activities discussion
We are currently discussing how to package activities in the future, in order to support all distributions. Please add your comments to the following pages.
- Packaging
- should we remove "Activities" section from that page; all issues where moved to Activity_Status page alsroot 10:33, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
- Packaging ideas
The Sugar Control Panel
While not strictly in the realm of Activities, it may be useful on occasion to add a section to the Sugar Control Panel. Things to keep in mind.
A typical update cycle
Anyone can contribute a patch to a Sugar Activity. The typical work cycle involves an interaction with the activity (project) maintainer as follows:
- make a clone (anyone)
- make your changes (anyone)
- mail your patch to sugar_devel (anyone)
- make changes as per suggestions by the project maintainer and developer community (anyone)
- push your changes (anyone)
- request a merge (anyone)
- write release notes (anyone)
- tag the new version in git (project maintainer)
- create the .xo and .tar files (project maintainer)
- upload .tar to download.sugarlabs.org (project maintainer)
- upload .xo to activities.sugarlabs.org (project maintainer)
- update wiki documentation (anyone)
OLPC XO game buttons
The game buttons on the OLPC XO are accessible:
- The left-side buttons map to KP_Up, KP_Right, KP_Down, and KP_Left
- The right-side buttons map to KP_Page_Up (o), KP_End (✓), KP_Page_Down (×), and KP_Home (◽)
The Sugar Object Chooser
The Object Chooser is the activity-level user interface to the Journal. Examples and caveats are found here.
Project Ideas
The Activity Team always needs project ideas and suggestions. Post your ideas to Activity Team/Project Ideas.
If you see something here you would like to help with, please contact us.
Wade 17:19, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
Additional resources
Additional resources may be found here.
Sugar Activity development courses
There are university- and secondary-school-level courses being taught around Sugar development. Several of the syllabi are on line:
- http://wiki.paraguayeduca.org/index.php/Curso_Sugar_FPUNA is being adapted by UNA
- http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/RIT/The_Course is being taught at RIT
Meetings
Please check /Meetings for meeting schedules/logs.
Moving to Sugar Labs
A few notes re moving to the Sugar Labs infrastructure:
- use git init to create a new project unless it already exists.
- use
setup.py dist_source
to make the source package associated with your project. - source packages now go in:
download.sugarlabs.org:/srv/www-sugarlabs/download/sources/
- from there, if your project (if it is an Activity) probably belongs in the honey subdirectory, e.g.,
download.sugarlabs.org:/srv/www-sugarlabs/download/sources/honey/Abacus/
- If your project is part of the Sugar core, it goes in sucrose/fructose/ (for core Activities) or sucrose/glucose (for core modules), e.g.,
download.sugarlabs.org:/srv/www-sugarlabs/download/sources/fructore/TurtleArt/ download.sugarlabs.org:/srv/www-sugarlabs/download/sources/glucose/sugar-toolkit/
- don't forget to update addons as well!!
activities.sugarlabs.org
- and to copy the tar file to download.sugarlabs.org
download.sugarlabs.org:/download/sources/honey/... download.sugarlabs.org:/download/sources/sucrose/fructose/...
Subpages
- Activity Team/Activity Development Fedora 17
- Activity Team/Activity Microformat
- Activity Team/Activity Status
- Activity Team/Compatibility Tips
- Activity Team/Contacts
- Activity Team/Control Panel
- Activity Team/Coordinator
- Activity Team/Creating Activity Using Mono
- Activity Team/Creating a New Activity
- Activity Team/Development Sprint
- Activity Team/FAQ
- Activity Team/Getting Involved
- Activity Team/Git
- Activity Team/Git Activity Maintainer Walkthrough
- Activity Team/Git FAQ
- Activity Team/Git Introduction
- Activity Team/Git Migration
- Activity Team/Git Tutorial
- Activity Team/How to migrate from Gitorious
- Activity Team/How to migrate from OLPC
- Activity Team/Maintainers
- Activity Team/Meetings
- Activity Team/Mission
- Activity Team/Modifing an Activity
- Activity Team/New Toolbars
- Activity Team/Object Chooser
- Activity Team/Obsolete
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Native Packages
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Bugs
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Collab
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Ds
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Env
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Glucose
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Gui
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Journal
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Shell
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Statistics
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Supervisor
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Services Toolkit
- Activity Team/Obsolete/Zero Sugar Use Cases
- Activity Team/Packaging
- Activity Team/Packaging Ideas
- Activity Team/Policy for nonresponsive maintainers
- Activity Team/Project Ideas
- Activity Team/Project Ideas/Micro Messages
- Activity Team/Releasing a New Activity
- Activity Team/Remote control your XO
- Activity Team/Resources
- Activity Team/Roadmap
- Activity Team/Sample code/Ruler
- Activity Team/Sugar-sprites
- Activity Team/Sweetener
- Activity Team/TODO
- Activity Team/Testing
- Activity Team/gst-plugins-espeak
- Activity Team/pycas-client