0.90/Notes

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Sucrose 0.90 Release Notes

What is new for users

To mimic the mesh behavior on devices where mesh hardware is not available and make the "under a tree"-scenario possible the Sugar Ad-hoc networks have been added. The Feature will add three default Ad-hoc networks, for channel 1, 6 and 11. They will be represented with designated icons in the neighborhood view. If Sugar sees no "known" network (the learner has not been connected to an currently available Access Point before) when it starts, it does autoconnect to an Ad-hoc network. First Sugar tries if there is an Ad-hoc network that is used by other learners in the area, if not it default to channel 1. Simon Schampijer from OLPC has been working on this Feature and back ported it as well to Sugar 0.84.

We will have a more stable collaboration experience in this release. Tomeu Vizoso from Collabora has been doing a great work to remove the Presence Service, meaning that activities and the Shell interact directly with non-Sugar-specific services such as Telepathy. There are no visible changes for the user but the overall collaboration experience should be more stable.

A new color selector is available for the control panel, thanks to the ongoing efforts of Walter Bender and the design team. Originally proposed for 0.88 this Feature went through several design iterations and finally consensus was reached. Now, we are excited to hear what the learners think about it.

Walter Bender has been working on another Feature during this cycle. The Spiral Home View is an enhancement to the Home View to enable the display of more icons. The idea is that after the circle becomes too large, rather than shrinking the icons, it morphs into a spiral. Only after the spiral no longer fits on the screen do the icons shrink.

Andrés Ambrois has been adding new filtering options to the Journal. You can sort now by size, creation date and modification date. The Feature originally implemented for Dextrose and sponsored by activity central has been found it's way successfully into 0.90, too.

What's new for developers

The following changes are important for developers using the Sucrose 0.90 developer platform.

Widgets

No new widgets have been added to the toolkit in the 0.90 development cycle.

Dependencies

New API has been added to telepathy-gabble and telepathy-salut to support the work on the collaboration framework, which results in needing 0.9.16 for tp-gabble and 0.3.13 for tp-salut.

One of the goals of the collaboration refactoring was dropping functionality in sugar that has been implemented in telepathy-mission-control, so Sugar now depends on tp-mission-control 5.4.3.

Activity Authors guidelines

There are still many activities that do not use the new activity toolbars introduced in 0.86. We encourage the switch to use the new toolbars as there have been huge improvements in usability (e.g. stopping an activity).

Jim Simmons has written a guide to writing Sugar Activities (Please see Make your own Sugar Activities!) which details how to convert your activity to the new toolbars without compromising performance on old Sugar systems.

Compatibility

There a no known compatibility issues, as of today.

Update to this version

Please use the instructions for your distribution (SoaS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc) of choice to upgrade to this release. Note that it may take a while until the release is packaged for each distribution. Please stay tuned for distribution specific announcements and watch out for updates at Get Sugar.

Getting the sources

If you want to package sugar for your favorite distribution or just want to examine sugar's lovely code ;) you can find all the source code of each module at the links below.

Glucose

For now please use the sources from the latest development release.

Looking at the release cycle details

You can browse the notes of each development release in 0.114. Their respective sources are listed there as well.

Looking Forward to 0.90

Planning of the next release cycle has started at 0.92/Roadmap.

Credits

Many people contributed to this release indirectly, including testing, documentation, translation, contributing to the Wiki, outreach to education and developer communities. On behalf of the community, we give our warmest thanks to the developers and contributors who made this Sugar release possible.

We want to especially thank:

• the Infrastructure team which does all this great work in the background without which the development would not be possible at all,

• the deployments that provide the development team with feedback from the field,

• the Design team which guided the design of features with UI changes or impact on the workflow,

• the Translation team which makes sure that Sugar is enjoyable in the local languages of our users,

• the developers that submit patches for new features and bug fixes,

• the maintainers that review patches and make sure their code is shippable and which provide packagers with new tarballs,

• the packagers which provide distributions with new Sugar packages,

• the SoaS team for providing during the development cycle a Sugar version to test with,

• the testers for finding the small and bigger issues,

• the release team and Development team for coordinating those efforts.