Development Team/Meetings
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. A reminder to add topics will be sent out each Monday.
Meetings
Thursday August 21 2008 - 14.00 (UTC)
Logs
Topics
Update
Roadmap
Status of bugfixing
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
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creative_Commons
- how to get that feature in:
- eben will make mockup by Aug 15 (http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7551)
- starting Aug 15 paulproteus will port the xisting UI to Eben's mockup.
- then he will send his code for review: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/CodeReview#Patch_submission
- after review the feature can be included
- We will meet for a status update on the cc the 14th of August in the sugar dev meeting
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
- Cerebro#Collaboration
- other features? (now is a good time to add them)
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.
- We found out that eben's list is basically not controversial and that we 'only' need to prioritize the topics :p
- 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)
- What about using PolicyKit made it's way in latest Gnome Gnome 2.22 for this?
- 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
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.
- Unitarian interface
- 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.
- santhosh and HFactor present Dhvani, a text-to-speech system for indian languages.
- Performance
- Ram use of any daemons.
- Fundamental CPU speed limitations(real time TTS?).
- TTS as accessibility vs. TTS as a reading tutor.
- Standardized bells.
- Interfacing with Sugar
- 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
- What points do we want to address?
- Links
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)
- Eben has been contributing code to match the UI design.
- Working now on visual notification for activity launch.
- Anybody interested can build and run inside jhbuild the following modules:
- 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
- development: http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/erikos/sugar;a=shortlog;h=controlpanel
- sugar-control-panel an activity?
- Eben made an interesting remark: The new design for the Journal supports actions that aren't "activities" so you are able to keep record of changes you made with the control panel (e.g. you changed your colors today").
- 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
- Latest redesign mockups
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs
- new developments can be tracked at: http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/tomeu/sugar;a=summary
- Sugar Control Panel (GUI)
- mockup:
- Changes to sugar requested for Develop Homunq 11:29, 4 March 2008 (EST)
- action item: create tickets for "Journal should let activity bundles be started in Develop". Done: <trac>6639</trac>. Also discussed: <trac>4365</trac>, <trac>6557</trac>, and <trac>2892</trac>.
- Speech synthesis: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-March/004411.html
- action item: eben reply to the thread
- New LiveCD with updated sugar packages: http://meta.fuentelibre.org/trac/wiki/LiveCD
- hardy packages + xubuntu in spanish
- "Faster" branch speedups -- status? Anyone planning on working on these?
- it is on the latest sugar roadmap so we want to work on it
- action item: Michael can you comment on what is needed here regarding kernel changes http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2276
Tuesday February 26 2008 ("small")
Logs
http://dev.laptop.org/~morgan/sugar_meeting_Feb_26.log
Attending
tomeu, erikos, garycmartin, morgs
Topics
- eben's notes about the redesign wiki.laptop.org/go/Design
- does the journal belongs into the shell or is it an activity, Eben?
- added a journal as core metaphor mock-up image --garycmartin 1:49, 29 February 2008
- presence service
- scalability issues for update.1
- morgs does want to look into groups
- groups would work like friending, there would be multiple groups, groups a teacher can add children to ad potentially multiple friend groups #4043
- would be interesting to know how hard the deployment need this
- webkit
- try to compare webkit http://live.gnome.org/WebKitGtk (comes with python bindings http://live.gnome.org/PyWebKitGtk) with xulrunner
- sugar
- accelerators (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-February/004344.html)
- benzea fixed palette issues (http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=sugar-toolkit;a=commit;h=c9871633e3f3b38bcb8ae388ebeaaa81ad4123c9, http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=sugar-toolkit;a=commit;h=826bf9dd4caa07903346a756f34779da3c6c47b1)
- browse: add right click and search
- add control panel option to set delay before frame pops in
- notifications: box containing an activity icon that pops up when someone is 'calling', could be used for notifications about devices, invitations and adding to the frame,
- Eben you had something like that in one mockup that each corner was used for different notifications?
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
- Disconnected backups
- Ridderman is working on focus bugs in Sugar / GTK. Kind of a nuts and bolts bug - http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2045
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