0.84/Notes

Sucrose 0.84 Release Notes

Introduction

Sucrose 0.84 is the latest version of the Sugar education platform, consisting of Glucose, the base system environment; and Fructose, a set of demonstration activities.

Sucrose is released every six months and contains many new features, improvements, bug fixes, and translations. Sucrose 0.84 continues this tradition and is our second well-planned release to date.

You can learn more about Sugar itself here.

What is new for users

What is new for developers

The following changes are important for developers using the Sucrose 0.84 developer platform. If you're not interested in changes for developers, you can skip forward to Section Internationalization and Localization.

Widgets

A colorpicker widget has been added. It is similar to the gtk.ColorButton, but does not have any alpha support. Instead of a color selector dialog it will pop up a Sugar palette. An example on how to use the ColorToolButton in your activity can be examined in the Write activity.

API

  • An ABI policy has been figured out and modules have been marked as STABLE / UNSTABLE / DEPRECATED.
  • Sugar moved to use Gconf as a back end to store the profile.
  • bundlebuilder (Do a more "standard" system installation for bundlebuilder
   - setup.py install takes a --prefix option and no arguments.
   - mo files are installed in /usr/share/locale.
   - po files are not installed
   - 8136 (marco), Drop broken release command)
  • extensions for the control panel
  • Move to cjson and drop pyjson and simplejson
  • Add view-source-related methods HandleViewSource and GetDocumentPath
  • The Object chooser can now be filtered by data type. This lets you open the dialog only showing entries of a specific data type, an example is the import image functionality in Write.
  • created the canvastextview in sugar/graphics
  • new ways to turn on debug logs
  • Let activities provide their own implementation of get_preview() #152
  • Restore minimal .xol support #459
  • Add accelerator support to menu items
  • util.TempFile
  • Listen for map in Window instead of in Canvas (alsroot) #428
  • Use the same font size independent from scaling

Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n)

Thanks to members of the worldwide translation team, who can be found on the localization mailing list, we have the following languages (listed alphabetically) which have significant support (more than 80% of the user interface translated):

  • Chinese (China)
  • Chinese (Taiwan)
  • Dutch
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Nepali
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Turkish
  • Vietnamese


Compatibility

When you upgrade a computer that was running previously Sucrose 0.82,

  • 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 0.84.x to an earlier version,

  • The datastore is incompatible, so all data in the journal won't be accessible (but will be still there)
  • You will be prompted to enter a new name and color like it would happen on first boot

Most of the activities in Sucrose 0.84.x should be compatible with Sucrose 0.82. An exception is Browse, which depends on new versions of Hulahop, Read which depend on the latest version of Evince and Write which depends on the latest version of libabiword.

Getting the sources

If you want to package sugar for your favourite 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

Fructose

Fructose dependencies

Detailed changes

Glucose

  • sugar
  • sugar-toolkit
  • sugar-base
  • sugar-presence-service
  • sugar-datastore
  • sugar-artwork
  • etoys

Fructose

Fructose dependencies

  • hulahop

Honey

Looking at the release cycle details

You can browse the notes of each development release in DevelopmentTeam/Release/Roadmap/0.84#Schedule. Their respective sources are listed there as well.

Looking Forward to 0.86

Planning of the next release cycle has started at DevelopmentTeam/Release/Roadmap/0.86.

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.