Development Team/Meetings

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About

  • Quick update about what we have been working on and eventually the problems we have run into.
  • Discussion about the implementation details of tickets we are planning to work on. Figure out how to split up the work and who should be owning the various parts.
  • Questions from activity authors about specific aspects of the platform and more in general on how to better integrate their activity in Sugar. Report about problems they run into.
  • Help out new contributors to figure out where to start. Point out the tickets we need help with, discuss with them the implementation.

When and where

  • Weekly
  • Thursday
  • 14.00 (UTC)
  • irc.freenode.net, #sugar-meeting

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/UTCHowto or run: 

date -d '[current date] [time] UTC' 
date -d '2008-06-03 14:00 UTC'

Who

The meeting is mainly targeted to Sugar core and activity developers, but everyone interested is welcome to join. It's primary purpose is to try to open the development up a bit, make it more transparent and allow the community to participate more easily. For when to join see 'When and Where'.

How to add topics

You can add the topics that you want to discuss during the week to the topics section for the meeting. They will be collected during the week and send out in the meeting announcement on Thursday morning.

Meetings

Thursday September 11 2008 - 14.00 (UTC)

Logs

Topics

Update (Thrilling news of this week)
Roadmap
Status of bugfixing
Introducing the new developers
Sugarbot

sugarbot is a GUI automation utility for the OLPC Project's Sugar GUI. It provides functionality for developers to write tests for their Activities, and monitor those tests in a similar manner to unit-tests. sugarbot supports continuous integration with buildbot, so that multiple platforms and host configurations may be tested seamlessly.

- What does that mean? OLPC developers now have a GUI automation environment that they can use to perform regression testing on their Activities. This enhances code reliability, and lets developers spend more time developing, and less time bug-testing and bug-hunting.

- Where can I see sugarbot in action? A screencast of Sugarbot is available here

- Where can I get sugarbot? Sugarbot's package and documentation is available here

Thursday August 28 2008 - 14.00 (UTC)

Logs

sugar-meeting-Aug-28-2008

Topics

Update (Thrilling news of this week)
Roadmap
Status of bugfixing
Introducing the new developers

Thursday August 21 2008 - 14.00 (UTC)

Logs

sugar-meeting-Aug-21-2008

Topics

Update (Thrilling news of this week)

No special news this week

Roadmap

What do we want to do for ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84 ?

  • we aim for a 6 months cycle (another week to set this in stone)
  • please add your points to this page ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84#Goals - we want to discuss these next week
Status of bugfixing
  • which bugs rest for 0.82
    • marco will review the open reviews and give his opinion about landing in 8.2
    • erikos has to do 7480 and 7871
    • everyone should work on blockers, until 8/27 we can push fixes we have code already for (even though they are high and no blockers) if we get marcopg, cscott, or micahel to okay them. michael is happy if other bugs get fixed; he just don't want other bugs getting fixed at the expense of the blockers (more details will follow in another email).
  • stable releases: 0.82.1 will be a stable coordinated release (which will help to resynchronise translations), we will rely on non-coordinated module releases until then, the packages for the non-coordinated releases should be announced on the mailing list that packagers can step in and do the packaging work for their distributions
    • release date for 0.8.2 will probably be September the 17th (more details from michael)
    • release date for 0.82.1 will probably be September the 5th (more details in another email)
Introducing the new developers
Control panel updater

Design, consequences, profit! We will have guest speaker Scott coming in to talk about the sugar-control-update module.

Thursday August 14 2008 - 14.00 (UTC)

Logs

Topics

Update
Roadmap
Status of bugfixing
Introducing the new developers
Better activity development communication

including activity development mailing list

Control panel updater

Implications for activity developers: How to publish releases

Thursday July 31 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/meeting_logs/sugar_meeting_31_07_2008.log

Topics

Update

The usual bugfixing for the upcoming release. Morgs and david spoke with the ubuntu and debian people in order to get the packaging processes going so potential developers have something to look at. Walter has been in discussion with GNOME and a few education groups - more on those topics in tomorrows sugarlabs meeting: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007508.html

Roadmap

action items:

  • triage squad
  • testing team
  • keep trac under control so that we have a good view of where we are
  • make sure to get the new release in Fedora
  • write down the points for the 9.1 release
Status of bugfixing

we need for more testing!

Introducing the new developers

Maybe next week :)

Move meeting to an earlier time

The next meeting will be at 14.00 UTC

Proposal: Mailing list for activity developers

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007503.html

Will be discussed next week or via the mailing lists --Morgs 19:52, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
Activity Update system in control panel

Implications for activity developers: How to publish releases

Will be discussed next week or via the mailing lists --Morgs 19:52, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Thursday July 24 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~tomeu/sugar_meeting_24_07_2008.log

Attending

Topics

Update

People is working on bugs, Marco focused on Browse, he's back full time in the team. Tomeu on miscellanea bugs, worked with Riccardo Lucchese on performance (he's interning in OLPC this summer). Sayamindu is planning future work on the Read and Terminal activities.

Change in the translation process

After changes that break the string freeze get into git, the development team should notify the localization list, so the localization team can update Pootle.

There are some worries about the frequent string freeze breaks, we hope translators will understand and things will get better for the next release.

Roadmap

David Farning suggested that some preliminary work happened on identifying the areas that will be worked on in the next releases. Benjamin Schwartz argued that people should focus completely on the current release instead, and let future planning for later.

Three big areas of work that is sorely needed by deployments are collaboration, performance and datastore. How can we improve stability at the same time?

Benjamin thinks that we should focus for two weeks on planning, and close all questions then.

Walter wants to see documents about the architecture of the datastore and collaboration. Thinks that we should aim for 3 months of design work that end up on a roadmap.

Status of bugfixing

Two major surprises lately: arabic support and provisions for operating with full NAND.

Arabic support includes taking in account RTL in the UI layout, may not land in 8.2.0.

Being resilient to NAND full situations is very important in Uruguay, where machines that get full cannot boot until are reflashed. Several options are open here and we are trying to reach consensus.

Introducing the new developers

No new developers :( Maybe next week!

Thursday July 17 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/meeting_logs/sugar_meeting_17_07_2008.log

Attending

Topics

The Meeting itself

First we discussed how we can make the meeting even better. We want to have a fixed set of points we want to discuss each meeting.

  • update of the week (e.g. process changes)
  • roadmap
  • what are the latest bugs where can we need help on
  • introduction of new developers

Additionally we have topics that can be decided by the developers. These can be added by the developers during the week. The complete process is described here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#How_to_add_topics

The mails: You can count on receiving these mails in the sugar mailing list.

  • monday: reminder to add_topics
  • thursday: meeting reminder
  • thursday: minutes from the meeting
Creative commons licensing functionality in the journal

Thursday July 10 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Logs

Attending

Topics

Topic

Thursday July 03 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Logs

Attending

Topics

What let's left for the upcoming release

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Schedule

Changes in the review process

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/CodeReview#Patch_submission


Thursday June 12 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/meeting_logs/sugar_meeting_Jun_12_2008.log

Attending

Topics

Update on the status of the ongoing features

Looks very good: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#New_features

How to announce a new release of an activity best?

unmadindu looked into remora http://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Remora. he noted that it's not well documented, and the look and feel needs to be changed significantly (it's primarily written for addons.mozilla.org), and we would need some PHP dev to modify it for our work

Conclusion: Someone needs to step in and do it if he/she has time!

Providing test plans along releases

m_stone and QA are requesting that each release we get in the stable build is associated with a set of tests that they need to perform to verify that stuff works as expected.

Basically we make mandatory to have a trac item associated with each news in the changelog and each trac item needs to have a testcase in it. We could use some keyword in the comment to mark it so that it can be extracted automatically. We need a ticket for each feature or fix - each item in the news basically.

Documentation efforts for Sugar API and creating sugar activities

fanwar's overall approach: One set of docs for high level functional design of sugar (Human Interface Guidelines), one set for how to's (almanac - which is what I'm working on), one set of apis from the actual code (which will be extracted through pydocs) and also some basic startup docs like those by Christoph in olpc austria.

For the moment the place where the documentation can be found is: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar-api-doc

fanwar requests: In the meantime, everyone continues to document code using pydocs and also please contribute to the almanac wiki yourselves.

Thursday June 05 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/meeting_logs/sugar_meeting_Jun_05_2008.log

Attending

too many to name :)

Topics

How can we improve the review process?

action item: unmadindu/cjb setup review board http://www.review-board.org/

1. Break your projects into small pieces that can be submitted for review independently. Submit for review as early as possible, by mailing list or review-board site or whatever other mechanism.

More specific:

  • preferred way if possible: 1. code a small part, 2. submit to review, 3. get into joyride, 4. repeat
  • not talking about: 1. code everything, 2. split in patches, 3. submit

2. If you want testing before review, make a topic build.

3. Some new tools will be needed to make topic builds easier to make. (.img, .rpm, and .deb)

Bundlebuilder: how to create the source tarballs best to not include unintentional files.

We agreed to use an explicit MANIFEST but to provide tools to build it automatically. homunqlus is going to work on a patch for this. We need to try and freeze bundlebuilder to be able to include Develop in 8.2.

How to announce a new release of an activity best?

Deferred to next week meeting

Thursday April 17 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~morgan/sugar_meeting_Apr_17.log

Attending

Topics

  • Collaborative activities
  • The collaboration framework
  • Collaboration Central
  • Adding collaboration to activities
  • Upgrading to the new Presence Service API in Update.1
  • API improvements required? (buddy<->handle tracking, reducing boilerplate code...)
  • New proposed collaboration API

Tuesday April 08 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/meeting_logs/sugar_meeting_Apr_08.log

Attending

eben, homunq, garycmartin, tomeu, bemasc, daf, morgs, erikos

Topics

  • discuss eben's sugar todo list: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-April/004909.html
    • We found out that eben's list is basically not controversial and that we 'only' need to prioritize the topics :p
      • action item: prioritize the topics
    • Expose an avatar property for buddies in the ps
      • daf stated that we have specific support for avatars in Gabble, which uses hashes, and therefore would reduce overhead.
  • AlertBox for use with palettes/notifications
    • mockup: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Specifications/Object_Transfers#Preliminary_Mockups
    • sumup:
      • an object transfer error occurs.
      • create a new palette and embed an alertbox in it.
      • create a notification object.
    • attach the new alert palette to both the notification and the transfer object in the frame.
      • Then, upon the cancel/retry button callback: make sure that the notification is gone, reattach the old palette, take the appropriate action.
    • action items:
      • a) create an AlertBox class (probably a subclass of alert or make alert more generic)
      • b) add support for more complex layout to Palette class (ability to set the content before and/or after the menu independently)
  • Activity bundle format, autoupdate
    • Homunq has a proposal up at Talk:Activity_bundles#Proposals_for_update
    • two proposals: a philosophical one about where we want to get to, including activity threading with forks, and an implementation one, which only covers activities as long as the signing key stays the same.
    • Philosophically:
      • Eben says any change of key should count as a different activity
      • Homunq argues that still grouping them in the UI will allow tighter control of keys, and that the UI can give appropriate guidance on secure practices.
      • Agree to disagree for now, because implementation is not urgent.
    • Implementation Signatures
      • morgs has minor comment about hash format (hex instead of base64, for easier comparison
      • no further comments
      • homunq will start work this week
      • unresolved issue: how to store private key for signing an activity?
        • we need to talk to m_stone .

Tuesday April 01 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/sugar_meeting_Apr_01.log

Attending

bemasc, homunq, tomeu, bertf, m_stone, garycmartin, erikos, eben, cjb

Topics

  • Sugar-Control-Panel - timezone
    • handle root permissions for settings like timezone (can this be done in the background)
  • Sugar-Control-Panel - language
    • how to generate the list of languages and their translation best)
    • desired output: current locale, language in language itself, territory
    • example: ingles/english, frances/francais, aleman/deutsch
    • do we make the same for the territory than what we do for the language?

Tuesday March 25 2008 ("TTL-meeting") exceptional time: 15.00 (UTC)

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/sugar_meeting_Mar_25.log

Attending

David Bolter

Timothy Hobbs, timthelion

Jorge Silva

Arjun Sarwal

Hemant Goyal

Assim Deodia

Alex Escalona (vergueishon on olpc here and here)

eben, tomeu, erikos

Topics

  • Meetings in #olpc-meeting
    • Announce the meetings here: Meeting
    • action: send note about that to #devel-ml, #sugar-ml
  • TTS
    • Interfacing with Sugar
      • Unitarian interface
        • Screen readers, TTS engines, and any other text grabbing UI addons (Could that mean tty output, ssh ;)) should all be able to use the same interface.
        • Discuss how orca can possibly be used in the sugar environment. (speech-dispatcher as a speech-synth backend is supported by orca)
        • Discussion about speech-dispatcher, and how it can be used to interface with sugar activities.
      • Discuss some UI considerations for speech synthesis configuration management in Sugar Control Panel.
      • Discuss the magic button for speech synthesis.
    • Support for multiple languages
      • How should the process for including a new language work
      • (This is copied up from the last meeting)
        • santhosh and HFactor present Dhvani, a text-to-speech system for indian languages.
          • santhosh has already worked into integrating Dhvani into Speech Dispatcher.
          • Dhvani will need to be packaged in Fedora.
    • Performance
      • Ram use of any daemons.
      • Fundamental CPU speed limitations(real time TTS?).
    • TTS as accessibility vs. TTS as a reading tutor.
    • Standardized bells.


  • Short Term Implementation Plans
    • Discussing feasibility of speech-dispatcher for the XO
    • Discussion of speech-dispatcher python API
    • Discussion of speech-dispatcher sugar configuration management
    • UI elements of speech synthesis control panel
    • Working on something like sugar.speech?
    • performance analysis of speech dispatcher for the XO
  • Long Term Plans
    • Development of Guidelines for using speech synthesis for developing self-voicing activities.
    • Expansion of ideas list and encouraging community developers to incorporate speech synthesis in their activities.
    • Streamlining speech synthesis projects in OLPC community
    • Community involvement/experimentation to improve quality of synthesized voice, as well as "localization" efforts to make speech sounds more natural-sounding relative to the user
  • Literacy Project
    • What points do we want to address?
      • Dictionary and eBook Projects
      • Teaching Tools that use speech synthesis
      • Tools for helping students learn new languages, improve their language skills


Tuesday March 18 2008 ("big")

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/sugar_meeting_Mar_18.log

Attending

tomeu, bertf, erikos, eben, HFactor, shikhar, santhosh

Topics

Update on everybody's work

  • Redesign Home view (tomeu)
  • Control Panel (erikos)
    • Working now on providing a fade-out look around the dialog. Investigating the new matchbox that contains much improved composition support.
  • Develop (homunq): can't attend the meeting but check it out. Search/replace is a mess but anything else, go ahead and start posting bugs. http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=activities/develop;a=summary . To resume editing on the activity bundles it creates, you need to use the DoppelJournal activity (included in the git tree), which is a renamed copy of journal with the relevant bug fixed. Homunq 09:43, 18 March 2008 (EDT) "git clone git://dev.laptop.org/activities/develop"
  • santhosh and HFactor present Dhvani, a text-to-speech system for indian languages.
    • santhosh has already worked into integrating Dhvani into Speech Dispatcher.
    • Dhvani will need to be packaged in Fedora.
    • Would be good to have a meeting next week with all the people interested in TTS.

Tuesday March 11 2008 ("small")

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/sugar_meeting_Mar_11.log

Attending

garycmartin, eben, benzea, cjb, homunq, ChristophD, erikos

Topics

  • meeting reminder
    • people can put topics on the wiki until Tuesday morning
    • erikos will send a message including these topics to the sugar-ml so more people read the topics and can join if it sounds interesting
  • sugar-control-panel
  • Lots of current activities don't have a bundle .xo for download on the Wiki
    • this got special attention due to the build core changes
    • how do we best address this issue?
    • encourage the activity authors to upload bundles and update the links on the wiki or provide a mechanism in bundlebuilder or at another place?

Tuesday March 4 2008 ("big")

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/sugar_meeting_Mar_04.log

Attending

  • person, task, where
  • Homunq, Develop, Guatemala (UTC-6)
  • morgs, presence, ZA
  • bertf, Etoys, Germany
  • erikos
  • tomeu
  • eben
  • garycmartin

Topics

Tuesday February 26 2008 ("small")

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~morgan/sugar_meeting_Feb_26.log

Attending

tomeu, erikos, garycmartin, morgs

Topics

Tuesday February 19 2008 ("big")

Logs

http://dev.laptop.org/~tomeu/sugar_meeting_Feb_19.log

Attending

tomeu, erikos, cjb, ChristophD, daja77, Ridderman

Topics

  • roadmap: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Roadmap
    • Tomeu tried to describe the latest mockups for the New Home view and Frame design.
    • UI for sugar-control-panel, ChristophD appearently did some work on this (early screenshot and info)
  • Activity handbook:
    • "The purpose of the activity handbook is to provide you with all the information you need in order to get started with software development for the OLPC XO."
    • http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook
    • currently working on chapters about GUI elements and Journal, next update should become available over the next 2 weeks
  • distribute/share activity
    • distribute Journal entries and activities
    • use ObjectChooser to choose the object to share
    • bemasc was not around to discuss his activity
  • Message Board activity
    • the idea is to have some way of providing a persistent message board without a school server or Internet access.
    • if you have a school server it could be a webpage on the school server
    • for example, every laptop could broadcast every message board note it's seen and the activity could know to collate them and remove duplicates
    • passing a USB stick with a portable mediawiki

Tuesday October 30 2007

(all the meeting logs go here: http://www.pseudorandom.co.uk/tmp/freenode-olpc-meeting.log)

  • How do we log the meeting. (see above)
  • Quick status updates.
  • Reinier introduction.
  • #4022 browser cannot open files generated by view source.
  • #3239 Control Panel, user preferences
  • Correct way to get access to temporary file space during activity execution ?
  • Update1. Branching and trac.
  • Module maintainers. Distribute the release duties.
  • Managing the build system chaos. (idea: coordinated releases of the Sugar core. What is core?)
  • How do we bring back joyride into shape.
  • What API changes to expect before next milestone.

Who is where: 

bertf: Germany
Cassidy: BE
daf: UK
edsiper: Chile
Erikos: Germany
hmmmbird: SA
marcopg: Italy
morgs: SA
rwh: NL
Sjoerd: NL
smcv: UK

bertf:		E-toys, implementing tubes
Smcv:		audit/improve tubes usage
edsiper:	developer console: stripping down, composed of 3 activities: Analyze, Log, Terminal
                http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developer_Environment
cassidy:	finishing stream tubes in Salut
morgs:		working on PresenceService reliability improvements, Connect
sjoerd:		finishing 
hmmmbird:	WorldWideWorkshop Joke Machine (waiting #3060)
marcopg:	had meeting with Ivan and Tomeu about backups, marcopg & Tomeu do sugar side, Ivan client/server
                (school server), fighting with build system
erikos:		works on control panel, functioning version
tomeu:		next to backups, screenshots
uwogBB:         Implement support for custom keybindings, develop AbiCollab debug tooling, Implement "find"
                support in Write (done)

ACTIONS: 

bertf:		talk to smcv about tubes
marcopg:	list of activities, list of modules, assign some sugar + activity tickets to rwh, drop the created xm branch and create an update1 one

morgs:		talk to jg about getting bot up for logs
smcv:		post logs at: http://www.pseudorandom.co.uk/tmp/freenode-olpc-meeting.log
erikos: 	check for #4022 everything for 'Hint write about using txt with a view_source property' seems in place already

erikos: 	control panel, user preferences:do not move olpc-update into script, fix radio on/off, restart sugar
hmmmbird:	Correct way to get access to temporary file space during activity execution ? should use use get_activity_root() instead of /tmp 
everyone: 	read Walter's mail for clarification of the names (Update1 etc)
module_owners: module owners should create update1 branches as necessary (help: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Git_Tips)


  • The branch/build procedure discussion is moved to the journal/tubes meeting
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