Sucrose 0.83.1 Release Notes

Announcement

This is our first Development Release in the 0.84 cycle. The code base has seen many refactoring efforts to improve the platform. To improve performance several heavy shell dependency have been dropped and the journal and the shell service has been merged into the shell. Furthermore the datastore has been rewritten, to simplify and improve maintainability. The API has been kept in place.

Sugar moved to use Gconf as a back end to store the profile. An ABI policy has been figured out and modules have been marked as STABLE / UNSTABLE / DEPRECATED.

Some enhancements have been made to the clipboard to provide visual consistency with the Sugar environment. And of course many many bugs have been fixed, which you can see in detail below.

Thanks

To everyone for bearing with us and keeping up the good work in this new release cycle!

Compatibility

When you upgrade a computer running an earlier version,

The old datastore will be updated to the new format.
Your old profile (in .sugar/default/config) will be imported into GConf

If you later downgrade from Sucrose 0.83.1 to an earlier version,

The datastore is incompatible
You will be prompted to enter all your profile settings like you are on first boot

Most of the activities in Sucrose 0.83.1 should be compatible with Sucrose 0.82 , the version shipped with OLPC Release 8.2.0. An exception is Browse, which depends on new versions of XULRunner and Hulahop. Read likewise may soon depend on a new version of Evince

Glucose modules

Glucose news

sugar-toolkit

Mark modules as STABLE/UNSTABLE/DEPRECATED
#8420 Failure to handle 404 in ChunkedGlibHTTPRequestHandler
#7649 Activities needs to access sugar-toolbox's members directly
#8617 Clipboard scroll buttons icons point left/right, should point up/down
#8604 Tray control should support highlight on drag
#8840 Can't join shared activity
#8674 8.2-764, Software Update erased complete /home/olpc/Activities directory
#8626 Icons overlap unnecessarily in crowded neighborhood view.
#8563 Sugar Palette doesn't handle 'table menus'.
#8532 SIGCHLD fights with threads.
#8485 Shell navigation leaks
#8375 gst usage in the shell wastes 2.6mb
#8394 sugar shell leaks presence service info
#8469 palette.menu is leaked
#8394 sugar shell leaks presence service info
#8392 Remove "dynamic" font height computation
#5428 downloads not starting in Browse due to old compreg.dat
#7999 7+% of shell startup time is spent in `grab' of sugar._sugarext.KeyGrabber
#8000 Pulsing icon on activity launch significantly slows activity start-up
#7270 setup release does not update the bundle number
#7959 gettext translations slows journal's scrolling
#7733 Cannot install Wikipedia-10.xo
#7533 Activity does not respond to ctrl-q keyboard shortcut unless the 'Activity' tab is visible

sugar

Modularized the shell to have every major UI component like the frame the home view and the control panel reside in his own module and be self contained
Use gconf as a backend to store the profile.
Several heavy shell dependency have been dropped.
Merge of the journal and of the shell service into the shell
#5867 "Battery fully charged" shows up in error (battery is removed)
#8623 Jabber server description is ambiguous
#8900 Should re-request closed random views
#7545 Should request random activities/buddies to populate the mesh view
#5751 Clipboard objects need meaningful labels.
#8606 Dragging within the clipboard creates duplicate clippings
#7408 Cursor lock while dragging icons in Home (or anywhere)
#8604 Tray control should support highlight on drag

sugar-artwork

Ensure that all common drag operations use a sugar cursor
Generate two themes based on SUGAR_SCALING
#8779 Merge sugar-artwork patches from debian package.
#8778 allow prelightning of buttons

sugar-base

Add dispatcher implementation from django
Mark modules as STABLE

sugar-datastore

The datastore has been rewritten, to simplify and improve maintainability. As a first step the API was not changed at all (other than removing removable devices support), so that the new implementation was swapped in without changes to activities and Sugar.
Drop for now the management of removable devices inside the DS. Removable devices support in Sugar should happen without intervention from the DS.
#8155 The datastore should hard link identical files, to handle repeated downloads of the same content without filling up NAND.
#4662 Support arbitrary metadata properties that activities wish to add
#6269 Degrade gracefully if a database gets corrupted- Basic functionality should only depend on the filesystem being available. Any other data structures (full text index) should be rebuildable from the filesystem.

sugar-presence-service

#7581 Don't ignore buddies without keys. This improve interoperability with non Sugar clients.
#7849 Display PS version in the log.
Use gconf to get Sugar profile settings.
#8444 Don't rely on the roster to check if a contact handle is channel specific or not - so PS will properly create Buddy objects discovered using Gadget. Furthermore, this workaround has the nice side effect to improve compatibility with bugged shared roster (as the one of ejabberd).
#5618 Discard invalid handles if InspectHandles failed.

etoys

This version copes with the datastore using byte arrays for strings, thus allowing to resume again

Fructose modules

Fructose news

read-activity

The version bump is to allow for stable releases after Read-52 which is the current stable release.
#8350 Use journal object picker if not resuming a file
#7017 Read sharing can deadlock.

chat-activity

The version bump is to allow for stable releases after Chat-48 which is the current stable release.
#8471 Can't resume a previous Chat entry with Write anymore

browse-activity

Add a "Download image" option to the image palette (tomeu)
Add a "Download link" option to the link palette (tomeu)
Get downloads and upload alerts for multiple windows to work (marco)
#8857 Handle download names with non-ascii characters (tomeu)

terminal-activity

#4646 Systemwide keyboard shortcuts break terminal apps (e.g. nano)
#8515 Terminal-activity: path does not contain olpc-update

Updated translations:

tr
pt

Fructose dependencies

hulahop 0.4.7

Fructose dependencies news

hulahop

Provide the ground to make downloads and uploads work for multiple instances (marco)

0.84/0.83.1 Notes

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