Changes

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|archived here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|archived here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

===Sugar Digest===

==Sugar Digest==

1. activities.sugarlabs.org (ASLO) has been the subject of much discussion of the past few weeks. One thread has been in regard to making ASLO a place where not only Sugar developers upload their activities, but where Sugar learners upload the media objects that they create with Sugar activities. For example, a place for children to upload and share their Turtle Art projects or Physics simulations. A second thread has been in regard to whether or not to allow activities to be uploaded onto ASLO that contain non-Sugar dependencies. An example might be an architecture-specific binary file that is included in a .xo bundle or simply a dependence on a library that is not part of the core Sugar distribution. The arguments for such restrictions have to do with robustness and user experience. We don't want users to download activities that subsequently don't run, either because of an architecture mis-match or a missing dependency. We also want to be very careful about automatically pulling in dependencies because bandwidth and local storage are extremely limited for many Sugar users. However, from the beginning, Sugar has accommodated activities with dependencies external to the Sugar core: Etoys, Write, and Browse being three examples. And with the growth of the netbook market and innovations such as Sugar on a Stick, it is inevitable that Sugar users will be using a wide variety of architectures. (For example, OLPC is exploring the use of ARM processors in their laptops.) And, while we want to provide a consistent and substantial learning experience within Sugar itself, the extent to which we can be inclusive of other learning activities gives Sugar users the ability to reach further than they would otherwise. None of this suggests that we are abandoning the idea of a learning platform that provides a collection of affordances to the learner, such as the Journal, collaboration, and view source; Sugar (Sucrose and Fructose) is mostly written in Python with a consistent user experience across all of its activities; but our learning community should not have artificial walls and ceiling.

1. Simon Schampijer announce that our 0.88 Release Candidate is ready for testing. We are in "Code Freeze", only critical bug fixes can be landed now. Any testing would be greatly appreciated. You can access the latest bits for testing using sugar-jhbuild (update and build) or downloading a Sugar-on-a-Stick image from http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/soas/. There is also a Karmic-based ppa for use on Ubuntu (See [[Community/Distributions/Ubuntu#Sugar-0.88_on_Ubuntu_9.10_.28karmic.29]]).

In a [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-March/022819.html post] that ties the two threads together, Ben Schwartz wrote:

Simon has begun pulling together release notes (See [[0.88/Notes]]).

:If Sugar is working as intended, 99% of Activities will be crap. This is because the purpose of Sugar is to invite novices to engage actively in software development. Novices make bad stuff, and we want to install and run that stuff.

Many thanks to Simon, our release manager, and the many community members who have contributed to this release, including Sascha Silbe and Aleksey Lim, both of whom have been relentless in closing tickets.

Or put another way, we want our learners to engage in creating and debugging, sharing their creations and engaging in a dialog about their creations. Developers learn by doing and so do children. ASLO is not just a portal for developers, it is a portal for learners.

It is worth noting that many of the new features and "under-the-hood" improvements in this release have come from "local lab" efforts. For example, teams in Uruguay and Paraguay have led much of the development efforts. This is due in large part to the steadfastness of Tomeu Vizoso and Bernie Innocenti, both of whom have been working hard to help local efforts better integrate with the Sugar upstream project. This highly distributed model, where problems are identified on the ground and largely addressed locally, but then integrated with the upstream project is a powerful and sustainable model for Sugar.

Aleksey Lim (alsroot) solicited a policy statement from SLOB regarding the hosting of activity bundles with non-Sugar dependencies on activities.sugarlabs.org.

2. Tim McNamara, our Google Summer of Code coordinator has been hard at work. He has submitted our application and is now busy with the recruitment process. You can learn more about how you might participate in this year's program by visiting [[Summer_of_Code]]. Please help spread the word to potential candidates.

The Sugar Oversight Board passed a motion that: (1) Bundles with non-Sugar dependencies be clearly marked in ASLO; (2) We work towards a mechanism for supporting access to non-Sugar dependencies—a specific endorsement of being open; and (3) We do not restrict ASLO while we progress towards #2.

3. Josh Williams has been working on a new skin for our wiki. See http://wiki-devel.sugarlabs.org/ to get a sense of where he is heading. The new theme is simple, clean, and more in keeping with the Sugar style used on our other sites.

Mel Chua raised the question of support. I argued that this was a question orthogonal to architecture and dependencies, but that we clearly should make it clear to our user community that certain activities are supported. We'll be discussing the details at our next meeting.

===In the community===

 

4. LIBREPLANET begins on Friday, 19 March. You can learn more about these three dats of Free Software activism at http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2010. (I'll be participating in the program on Saturday.)

 

5. Ken Haase, a former colleague of mine at MIT, has been working on a new ebook reader that may be of interest to the Sugar community. You can play with it by visiting http://sbooks.net. It is built in Javascript and it has offline reading capabilities as well, which, with Lucian Branescu's patches to Browse (which hopefully will land in Release 0.90), it might make a very interesting Sugar activity. Ken is also developing a site for having children add metadata to ebooks (See http://beebooks.org for more details).

===In the community===

 

 

===Tech talk===

 

3. Things are moving quickly in Argentina. Gonzalo Odiard has been blogging about their progress in La Rioja at [http://godiard.blogspot.com/ 1] (Also see [http://www.idukay.edu.ar/dirprimaria/ 2])

9. Matt Gallagher has been working on Gnome-desktop integration of Turtle Art.

===Sugar Labs===

===Sugar Labs===

4. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2010-Feb-27-Mar-5-som.jpg|SOM]]).

:File:2010-Mar-6-12-som.jpg|Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

=== Community News archive ===

== Community News archive ==

An '''[[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|archive]]''' of this digest is available.

An '''[[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|archive]]''' of this digest is available.